Call for Participation
The NTCIR-18 Pilot Task for Searching Unseen Sources for Historical Information (SUSHI)
https://sites.google.com/view/ntcir-sushi-task/

Traditional search systems seek to find digital content.  The goal of the SUSHI task, by contrast, is to find content in archival institutions such as the Japanese National Diet Library or the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration without ever having digitized or created item-level metadata for most of that content.  The key idea in SUSHI is to take advantage of the way many archives are organized, with similar things stored together, to make it possible to learn from a small digitized (or well described) sample to guess what else might be stored nearby. 

Participating teams can submit results for one or both of the two SUSHI subtasks:
A.	Given a query, produce a ranked list of archival storage containers that contain relevant documents.
B.	Given a footnote, endnote or reference from a scholarly publication, decide whether it contains a reference to archival content, and if so extract that reference.
In each case the SUSHI organizers will provide a test collection, participants will submit results, and then the organizers will create ground truth and evaluate the submitted results.  SUSHI will thus produce reusable test collections for its subtasks, and it will help foster a research community focused on searching large archives that principally contain physical media such as paper.  We envision a community that brings together people with interests in information retrieval, natural language processing, graph models, and cultural heritage institutions.

To participate, fill out the NTCIR-18 participation form at https://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/ntcir-18/howto.html (indicating that you will participate in SUSHI) and also send the SUSHI organizers a quick email letting us know you shave signed up at [log in to unmask] so that we can add you to our mailing list.

Key Dates:
Now:		SUSHI Guidelines available on the SUSHI website
Jul 1 2024: 	Dry run test collections available
Aug 31 2024: 	Optional dry run submissions due
Sep 15 2024: 	Final test collections available
Nov 30 2024: 	Official run submissions due 
Feb 1 2025:	 Evaluation results sent
Jun 10-13 2025: NTCIR-18 conference in Tokyo

SUSHI Organizers:
Tokinori Suzuki, Kyushu University (Japan)
Douglas W. Oard, University of Maryland (USA)
Emi Ishita, Kyushu University (Japan)
Yoichi Tomiura, Kyushu University (Japan)

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Best regards,
Tokinori Suzuki