Dear colleagues,

We are glad to share the information of NTCIR-18 with you. This year, we have 9 interesting tasks, that cover the (1) Modern IR Tasks, (2) Access to Non-Digitized Archive Material, (3) Large Language Model Evaluation, and (4) NLP Tasks in Financial and Medical Domains. We will have a kickoff event within 24 hours. The task organizers will introduce their tasks. Below are more details, and please register for the kickoff event. We will send a Zoom link to you soon.

Feel free to let us know if you have any questions.

Best Regards, Qingyao Ai, Chung-Chi Chen, Shoko Wakamiya NTCIR-18 Program Co-Chairs

*Kick-Off Event*

- Date/Time: March 29th (Friday) 2024, From 16:00 To 17:30 p.m. - Onsite: Room 1902-1903, National Institute of Informatics - Online: Zoom (The link will be available for participants before the event.) - Fees: Free - Registration: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScumfe8q3HDe2Vul2RUhTxNacSt9KujvqMx... - Zoom link will be sent to the registered email address before the event. - For more details, please refer to our site: https://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/ntcir-18/kickoffcfp.html

*Kick-Off Event Tentative Program*

- Overview of NTCIR - Overview of NTCIR-18 - Introduction of each task - How to participate in NTCIR-18 - Q & A

*NTCIR-18 Tasks* *CORE TASKS*

1. AEOLLM: Automatic Evaluation of LLMs 2. FairWeb-2: The Second Fair Web Task 3. FinArg-2: Temporal Inference of Financial Arguments 4. MedNLP-Rad: Medical Natural Language Processing for Radiology 5. MedNLP-CHAT: Medical Natural Language Processing for AI Chat 6. Transfer-2: The Resource Transfer Based Dense Retrieval Task

*PILOT TASKS*

1. HIDDEN-RAD: Hidden Causality Inclusion in Radiography Report Generation 2. SUSHI: Searching Unseen Sources for Historical Information 3. UFO 2.0: Understanding of Non-Financial Objects in Financial Reports