Query understanding is a fundamental part of search engine, this workshop will present and discuss cutting edge research on all topics of query understanding, query auto-completion, query recommendation, query categorization, spelling correction, query reformulation/rewriting etc. In particular, the focus will be on understanding differences between web and mobile user-typed queries. As mobiles have become ubiquitous in the present world, it is quintessential to better understand user's queries to reduce their effort in search. The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers interested in query understanding for mobile search with the goal of identifying specific challenges that need to be addressed to advance the state-of-the-art.

Recent advent of big data applications and platforms has led to a renaissance in many areas of machine learning and data mining. Computational advertising, a burgeoning field that accumulated revenue of over 20 billion dollars in the first half of 2014 in the US alone, has particularly benefited, and the industry has observed a steady two-digit growth in the past few years. However, in order to maintain and improve upon this positive trend, researchers in academia and industry alike are faced with numerous theoretical and practical challenges that require immediate attention.
Objective of the workshop is to bring together interdisciplinary practitioners and researchers from industrial and academic research labs to discuss state-of-the-art research and future directions in the fields of Ad Targeting, User Modeling, Recommender Systems, and related areas in the era of Big Data. We expect the workshop to help develop and grow stronger a community of interested researchers, and yield future collaborations and exchanges.

Experimentation has become standard practice among the developers and operators of online services. Search, news, social media, and ecommerce platforms deploy them regularly and extensively. Engineers have turned to online experimentation systems because they are a source of reliable evidence, because they are quick to deliver actionable insights, and because they are increasingly simple to deploy. Many in industry now find themselves in the position of running large-scale experiments that involve research subjects often numbering in the hundreds of thousands, with wide-ranging, computer-automated variations in experimental treatment. As experimentation platforms and users become easily accessible, however, practitioners may increasingly put the well-being and trust of users at risk. (more)

Adult content is pervasive on the web, has been a driving factor in the adoption of the Internet medium, and is responsible for a significant fraction of traffic and revenues, yet rarely attracts the attention of researchers. This half-day workshop on Search and Exploration of X-Rated Information at the 2016 WSDM conference will discuss questions for information access tasks and search behaviour related to adult content. While the scope of the workshop remains broad, we will devote special attention to the privacy and security issues with respect to adult content. The recent release of the personal data belonging to customers of the adult dating site Ashley Madison provides a timely context for the focus on privacy and security. The data collected by adult sites, derived from both visitors to the site and providers of content, is arguably more sensitive than other commercial data, because of the controversial nature of the sites themselves.

The goal of 2016 WSDM Cup challenge was to assess the query-independent importance (static-rank values) of scholarly articles, using data from the Microsoft Academic Graph--a large heterogeneous graph comprised of publications, authors, venues, organizations, and fields of study. Phase 1 of the challenge ran from August – November 2015, and participant submissions were evaluated against a test set of expert human judgements. The top eight teams from Phase 1 have been invited to present their approaches at this workshop, and to participate in Phase 2 which will be completed prior to the WSDM 2016 conference. During Phase 2, the top-eight teams’ datasets have been applied as public facing flights in Bing search results and will power the ranker used by Bing for academic queries. The results of the Phase 2 evaluation will also be discussed at this workshop.