Recently, learning environments with e-learning or with gamification are developed. Since learners have been familiar with on-line communication through Social Network Services (SNS), it is expected that learning environment with network is ready to be available. In this study, a learning support environment by on-line competition quiz system is proposed. That is, learners can have high motivation to learn with ranking of experience points and human-human competition. Quiz is set as four multiple choices to continue learning easily and to be prepared various question sets through the Internet.

Images, deemed language-independent to some extent, can be utilized as an effective medium for representing/disambiguating user's search intent in interactive information access systems, such as a cross-language information retrieval system. If a target query concept (e.g. beaver) could be decomposed into a set of salient concept-feature pairs (e.g. beaver builds dams; beaver chews on woods, etc.), the depiction of each concept-feature pair may greatly help manifest the user's search intent. Given this motivation, we conducted an investigation on the Web-imageability of complex concepts (concept-feature pairs), which the psycholinguistic semantic feature database developed by McRae and his colleagues provides. More specifically, this paper reports on the human assessment results on how the images acquired from the Web by means of an image search engine, given a concept-feature pair, can adequately deliver the meaning. The results clearly show that physical motions and feeding behaviors performed by animate beings were more adequately depicted in the acquired Web images. This paper also discusses possible utility of visual images in interactive information access systems, and further argues mutual grounding of visual and linguistic information.

A curriculum is crucial to maintaining the integrity of various courses of universities, and an effort to improve a curriculum may include an analysis of the curriculum by comparing the curriculum with previous curricula or curricula of other universities. However, reading syllabi of each curriculum and comparing those curricula is too labor-intensive. We have been developing a method to project syllabi on a map by latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and Isomap for the comparison of curricula embodied by the syllabi. In this research, we applied our method to analyzing curricula offered by information science-related departments. The result of analysis of the maps showed that our curriculum maps reflected characteristics of each department.

We propose a visualization method showing relative characteristics of multiple documents which have different contexts. We provide users with an interactive graph correlating common words in multiple documents with characteristic words in each document, using co-occurrence and context similarity information. By allowing the users to discover underlying differences between superficially similar documents and to become conscious of them as new viewpoints, we intend to support understanding in terms of cooperative group activities or individual information collections. We examine our method using a document set with context information.

We basically could give any name to an object, because the relation between an object and its name is generally arbitrary. However, we find that some names fit the object, and other do not. This indicates that names are restricted by the objects to some extent. To investigate this restriction, this study operated naming test of meaningless images. The experimental results revealed that voiced sounds and vowel /a/ matched among the subjects, indicating that these sounds are bounded by the images. In contrast, a vowel /e/ is less restricted. These results would contribute to name generation, which is an unexplored research field.

NTCIR (NII Testbeds and Community for Information access Research) is one of the international workshops for research on information retrieval, question answering, natural language processing and so on, which is organized by the NII (National Institute of Informatics) in Japan. From September 2013, the eleventh NTCIR workshop (NTCIR-11) has started. This paper describes a framework, research tasks and schedule of the NTCIR-11 briefly.

This paper introduces the NTCIR-11 IMine task, whose aim is to explore and evaluate technologies of mining and satisfying different user intents behind a Web search query. The NTCIR- 11 IMine task comprises three subtasks: (1) Subtopic Mining, (2) Document Ranking, and (3) Search Task Mining. We briefly introduce these subtasks and how to participate in them. Japanese researchers in information retrieval, natural language processing, interactive information access, or machine learning are highly welcome to participate in the IMine task to accelerate their research.

NTCIR-11 Math-2 aims at promoting researches in mathematical content access. Based on the past experience in NTCIR-10 Math Pilot Task, we settled two major goals in our task: construction of a reusable test collection, and establishment of a research community in the field. In this paper, we introduce an outline of the task and briefly discuss possible challenges in mathematical content access.

Recently, medical records are increasingly written on electronic media instead of on paper, thereby increasing the importance of information processing in medical fields. We have organized an NTCIR-11 MedNLP task for medical records. Our pilot task, MedNLP, comprises three tasks: (1) term extraction for complaint and diagnosis, and (2) term normalization. These tasks represent elemental technologies used to develop computational systems supporting widely diverse medical services. This report presents the objective and data of this shared task.

The One Click Access Task (1CLICK) is one of the tasks of NTCIR that requires systems to return a concise multi-document summary of web pages in response to a query which is assumed to have been submitted in a mobile context. Our goal is to retrieve "information" rather than documents to directly and immediately satisfy a user's information need. We report the result of the second 1CLICK task in NTCIR-10 (1CLICK-2), and describe participants' approaches to discuss who can benefit from the participation in the 1CLICK task. Furthermore, we introduce the next round of the 1CLICK task called MobileClick, in which participants are required to submit a two-layered summarization suitable for mobile information access.

This paper introduces the SpokenQuery&Doc task, which will be conducted in the next NTCIR evaluation. The SpokenQuery&Doc is a successor to the previous SpokenDoc and SpokenDoc-2 tasks evaluated at the past NTCIR workshops, which are also presented in this paper.