AIRWeb '05 First International Workshop on
Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web
At the 14th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2005), 10-14 May 2005, Chiba, Japan

 

Workshop sponsored by
Ask 
Jeeves

 

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Welcome

Dear Participant:

Welcome to the First International Workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web (AIRWeb). This workshop is intended to bring together researchers and practitioners that are concerned with the on-going efforts in adversarial information retrieval on the Web. We have a total of eight peer-reviewed papers to be presented -- five research presentations and three synopses of work in progress. All convey the latest results in adversarial web IR, and address topics such as web spam, blog spam, cloaking, redirection, link optimization for PageRank, automated link spam detection, link bombs, reverse engineering of ranking algorithms, and propaganda. In addition, we will have a panel session in which workshop participants may raise additional questions of interest to industry experts and researchers.

I extend my thanks to the authors and presenters, and to the members of the program committee for their work in contributing to the material that forms an outstanding first workshop. I also sincerely thank Ask Jeeves for their support of the workshop, enabling us to partially cover travel costs for many of the student presenters. It is my hope that you will find the work presented interesting enough that you will ask questions, contribute ideas, and perhaps get involved in future work in this area.

 

Brian D. Davison, Program Chair
Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA
19 April 2005

 

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Overview

Search is the single most common application used on the Web. The attraction of hundreds of millions of searches per day provides significant incentive to content providers to do whatever necessary to rank highly in search engine results. The use of techniques that push rankings higher than they belong is often called spamming a search engine (or spamdexing). Such methods typically include textual as well as link-based techniques. Like e-mail spam, search engine spam is a form of adversarial information retrieval; the conflicting goals of accurate results of search providers and high positioning by content providers provides an interesting and real-world environment to study techniques in optimization, obfuscation, and reverse engineering, in addition to the application of information retrieval and classification.

The AIRWeb'05 workshop solicited technical papers on any aspect of adversarial information retrieval on the Web. Particular areas of interest included, but were not limited to:

Papers addressing higher-level concerns (e.g., whether 'open' algorithms can succeed in an adversarial environment, whether permanent solutions are possible, etc.) were also welcome.

Authors were invited to submit papers and synopses in PDF format. We encouraged submissions presenting novel ideas and work in progress, as well as more mature work. Submissions were judged by multiple experts on relevance, significance, originality, clarity, and technical merit.

 

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Program

9:00am Welcome
9:15am Session 1
10:30am Morning Break
11:00am Session 2
12:30pm Lunch
2:00pm Expert Panel Session
  • Moderator:
    • Brian D. Davison, Lehigh University
  • Panelists:
    • Andrei Broder, IBM Research
    • Soumen Chakrabarti, IIT Bombay
    • David Cohn, Google
    • Tim Converse, Yahoo
    • Marc Najork, Microsoft Research
3:30pm Afternoon Break
4:00pm Session 3
  • Blocking Blog Spam with Language Model Disagreement
    Gilad Mishne, University of Amsterdam
    David Carmel, IBM Research
    Ronny Lempel, IBM Research
  • SpamRank -- Fully Automatic Link Spam Detection
    András A. Benczúr, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA SZTAKI) and Eötvös University
    Károly Csalogány, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA SZTAKI) and Eötvös University
    Tamás Sarlós, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA SZTAKI) and Eötvös University
    Máté Uher, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA SZTAKI)
5:00pm Discussion
  • Directions for future work
  • Organization of AIRWeb '06

 

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Proceedings

Full Papers

Synopses

 

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Program Committee

Program Chair

Brian D. Davison, Lehigh University

Program Committee Members

Andrei Broder, IBM Research
David Carmel, IBM Research Haifa
Tim Converse, Yahoo
Nick Craswell, Microsoft Research Cambridge
Matt Cutts, Google
Dennis Fetterly, Microsoft Research
David Gibson, IBM Research
David Hawking, CSIRO
David D. Lewis, Independent Consultant
Mark Manasse, Microsoft Research
Kevin McCurley, IBM Research
Urban Mueller, Search.ch
Marc Najork, Microsoft Research
Jan Pedersen, Yahoo
Bernhard Seefeld, Search.ch
Baoning Wu, Lehigh University
Tao Yang, Ask Jeeves/Univ. of California, Santa Barbara

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Last modified: 3 May 2005, Brian D. Davison
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