Proceedings of the Ninth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (2016)

Welcome to WSDM, the 9th annual ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, held in San Francisco, USA. WSDM is one of the premier conferences on web inspired research involving search and data mining. We are pleased to present here the proceedings of the conference. The program reflects the breadth and diversity of research in the field and showcases the latest developments in the field. The conference received a total of 368 submissions, out of which 67 were accepted for publication. As has been customary for the conference, we used a two-tier single-blind review process. In the first stage, three to four program committee members were assigned to every paper. The PC members provided ratings and comments while evaluating the papers according to the standard criteria of relevance, quality, reproducibility, clarity, and impact. In the second stage, every paper was assigned nto a senior PC member. The senior PC member was tasked to oversee a discussion amongst the reviewers and attempt to reach a consensus recommendation for the paper. The final decisions were based on all of the above, as well as the senior PC member's recommendation. Ultimately 67 papers were selected for inclusion in the program. The WSDM 2016 acceptance rate of 18.2% is comparable to the previous years. The accepted papers are from 90 institutions in 18 countries. The top technical areas covered by the accepted papers (as indicated by paper keywords) are machine learning (19%), social networks (16%), search (15%), social media (10%), and ranking (9%). This year, continuing with the WSDM tradition, oral presentation slots were allocated to all 67 accepted papers. Out of the 67 papers, 20 were assigned long presentation slots and 47 were assigned short presentation slots. This assignment was based on the topic and results in each paper, with the Program Chairs assigning long slots to papers more likely to appeal to a broader audience. In addition to the oral presentations, all papers will be presented as posters in interactive sessions. We would like to acknowledge the tremendous work of the 41 senior program committee members, 243 program committee members, and 133 additional reviewers. Much of the credit for creating a high quality technical program goes to them. To recognize the hard work of the best reviewers, which is rarely publicized, we have awarded 21 Outstanding Reviewer Awards to members of the program committee, who were nominated by senior PC members as standing out amongst the reviewers. The technical program this year also features keynotes by prominent researchers from academia and industry, Jeff Dean (Google), Yiling Chen (Harvard University), and Foster Provost (New York University). The program also features four invited Practice & Experience talks, which were introduced for the first time at WSDM 2014. These comprise Yoelle Maarek (Yahoo Labs), Jie Tang (Tsinghua University), Lars Backstrom (Facebook), and Mor Naaman (Cornell Tech/Seen.co). We would like to thank the keynote and P&E speakers for sharing their technical insights and research contributions with the conference attendees. In addition, the program includes five workshops, two tutorials, and the WSDM Doctoral Consortium. We are happy to announce the first WSDM Cup Competition and expanded Industry Day that includes talks from venture capital investors and startups, taking advantage of the San Francisco location. The challenge in the inaugural 2016 WSDM CUP, organized by Microsoft and Elsevier, was to assess the query-independent importance of scholarly articles using data from the Microsoft Academic Graph. The VC & Industry Day includes four keynote and invited talks, three panels, and a poster session, discussing the role and application of data science in industry.