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...

This book provides a comprehensive presentation of a recently introduced framework, named "probabilistic indexing" (PrIx), for searching text in large collections of document images and other related applications. It fosters the development of new search engines for effective information retrieval from manuscripts which, however, lack the electronic text (transcripts) that would typically be required for such search and retrieval tasks. 

The book is structured into 11 chapters and three appendices. The first two chapters briefly outline the necessary fundamentals and state of...