Experiments in lifelog organisation and retrieval at NTCIR

Lifelogging can be described as the process by which individuals use various software and hardware devices to gather large archives of multimodal personal data from multiple sources and store them in a personal data archive, called a lifelog. The Lifelog task at NTCIR was a comparative benchmarking exercise with the aim of encouraging research into the organisation and retrieval of data from multimodal lifelogs. The Lifelog task ran for over 4 years from NTCIR-12 until NTCIR-14 (2015.02–2019.06); it supported participants to submit to five subtasks, each tackling a different challenge related to lifelog retrieval. In this chapter, a motivation is given for the Lifelog task and a review of progress since NTCIR-12 is presented. Finally, the lessons learned and challenges within the domain of lifelog retrieval are presented

Advances in lifelog data organisation and retrieval at the NTCIR-14 Lifelog-3 task

Lifelogging refers to the process of digitally capturing a continuous and detailed trace of life activities in a passive manner. In order to assist the research community to make progress in the organisation and retrieval of data from lifelog archives, a lifelog task was organised at NTCIR since edition 12. Lifelog-3 was the third running of the lifelog task (at NTCIR-14) and the Lifelog-3 task explored three different lifelog data access related challenges, the search challenge, the annotation challenge and the insights challenge. In this paper we review the dataset created for this activity, activities of participating teams who took part in these challenges and we highlight learnings for the community from the NTCIR-Lifelog challenges

Overview of NTCIR-13 Lifelog-2 Task

In this paper we review the NTCIR13-Lifelog core task, which ran at NTCIR-13. We outline the test collection employed, along with the tasks, the submissions and the findings from this pilot task. We finish by suggesting future plans for the task

Evaluating Information Retrieval and Access Tasks

This open access book summarizes the first two decades of the NII Testbeds and Community for Information access Research (NTCIR). NTCIR is a series of evaluation forums run by a global team of researchers and hosted by the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan. The book is unique in that it discusses not just what was done at NTCIR, but also how it was done and the impact it has achieved. For example, in some chapters the reader sees the early seeds of what eventually grew to be the search engines that provide access to content on the World Wide Web, today’s smartphones that can tailor what they show to the needs of their owners, and the smart speakers that enrich our lives at home and on the move. We also get glimpses into how new search engines can be built for mathematical formulae, or for the digital record of a lived human life. Key to the success of the NTCIR endeavor was early recognition that information access research is an empirical discipline and that evaluation therefore lay at the core of the enterprise. Evaluation is thus at the heart of each chapter in this book. They show, for example, how the recognition that some documents are more important than others has shaped thinking about evaluation design. The thirty-three contributors to this volume speak for the many hundreds of researchers from dozens of countries around the world who together shaped NTCIR as organizers and participants. This book is suitable for researchers, practitioners, and students—anyone who wants to learn about past and present evaluation efforts in information retrieval, information access, and natural language processing, as well as those who want to participate in an evaluation task or even to design and organize one