NTCIR (NII Testbeds and Community for Information access Research) is a series of evaluation workshops designed to enhance the research in information access technologies, such as information retrieval, question answering, and summarization using East-Asian languages, by providing infrastructures for research and evaluation. The project started late 1997 and has the workshop in 18-month cycle. It is a community-led activity and each round of NTCIR hosts several research tracks called "tasks", which are planned and organized by groups of international researchers. This talk focuses on Patent-related tasks and reviews how each of them has evolved and impacts to the research community and the society. Finally some thoughts on the future direction will be presented. Noriko Kando is a professor in the Information-society Research Division of the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, Japan, and has been coappointed as a professor in the Department of Informatics at the Graduate University of Advanced Studies, Japan. She is one of the NTCIR initiators (http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/index-en.html), an evaluation of information-access technologies, such as information retrieval, summarization, question answering, and text mining, using East Asian languages and English documents. She has been the main designer of many and various retrieval tasks: patent retrieval, cross-lingual IR, opinion analysis, complex question answering, community Q&A, geo-time search.
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