Call for Papers (Archived)

AIRWeb'08 Topics

Adversarial Information Retrieval addresses tasks such as gathering, indexing, filtering, retrieving and ranking information from collections wherein a subset has been manipulated maliciously. On the Web, the predominant form of such manipulation is "search engine spamming" or spamdexing, i.e., malicious attempts to influence the outcome of ranking algorithms, aimed at getting an undeserved high ranking for some items in the collection.

We solicit both full and short papers on any aspect of adversarial information retrieval on the Web. Particular areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Link spam
• Content spam
• Cloaking
• Comment spam
• Spam-oriented blogging
• Click fraud detection
• Ping spam
• Reverse engineering of ranking algorithms
• Web content filtering
• Advertisement blocking
• Stealth crawling
• Malicious tagging

Proceedings of the workshop will be included in the ACM Digital Library. Full papers are limited to 8 pages; work-in progress will be permitted 4 pages. See submission instructions for details.

Web Spam Challenge

Last year we introduced a novel element at the workshop: a Web Spam Challenge for testing web spam detection systems. We will be holding the Web Spam Challenge again this year, using the WEBSPAM-UK2007 collection.

The collection includes large set of web pages, a web graph, and human-provided labels for a set of hosts. We will also provide a set of features extracted from the contents and links in the collection, which may be used by the participant teams in addition to any automatic technique they choose to use.

We ask that participants of the Web Spam Challenge submit predictions (nonspam/spam) for all unlabeled hosts in the collection. Predictions will be evaluated and results will be announced at the AIRWeb 2008 workshop.

More information will be posted to http://webspam.lip6.fr/

Timeline

• 15 February 2008: E-mail intention to submit a workshop paper (optional, but helpful)
• 2 March 2008: Deadline for workshop paper submissions
• 24 March 2008: Notification of acceptance of workshop papers
• 7 April 2008: Camera-ready copy due
• 16 April 2008: Challenge submissions due
• 22 April 2008: Date of workshop

Organizers and Program Committee

Organizers:

• Carlos Castillo, Yahoo! Research
• Kumar Chellapilla, Microsoft Live Labs
• Dennis Fetterly, Microsoft Research

Program Committee:

• Einat Amitay, IBM
• András Benczúr, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
• Paul-Alexandru Chiri, Uni Hannover
• James Caverlee, Texas A&M University
• Gordon Cormack, University of Waterloo
• Nick Craswell, Microsoft Research
• Matt Cutts, Google
• Brian Davison, Lehigh University
• Ludovic Denoyer, University Paris 6
• Aaron D'Souza, Google
• Edel García, Mi Islita.com
• Natalie Glance, Nielsen BuzzMetrics
• Antonio Gulli, Ask.com
• Zoltán Gyöngyi, Stanford University
• Monika Henzinger, Google
• Pranam Kolari, Yahoo! Applied Research
• Mark Manasse, Microsoft Research
• Marc Najork, Microsoft Research
• Alexandros Ntoulas, Microsoft Search Labs
• Jan Pedersen, Yahoo! Search
• Erik Selberg, Amazon
• Torsten Suel, Polytechnic University
• Mike Thelwall, University of Wolverhampton
• Baoning Wu, Snap
• Tao Yang, Ask.com

E-mail: