AIRWeb: Web Spam Challenge

RESEARCH ON WEB SPAM

The AIRWeb workshop is now in its third edition. This workshop includes
several topics related to Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web,
that is, how to search, rank, or classify documents if a fraction of the
documents has been manipulated with a malicious intent. This includes
search engine spam as well as comment spam, splogs, click fraud, and
several other topics. The workshop page is at
http://airweb.cse.lehigh.edu/2007/

The dominant theme in past years has been search engine spam, an obnoxious
problem that affects all major search engines, either by tricking them into
showing irrelevant results for some queries, or simply by wasting a part of
their network and storage resources.

This year, the AIRWeb workshop will include a novel element: a reference
collection of Web pages, in which over 3,000 hosts have been labeled by a
team of volunteers as spam or non-spam. The following is a partial view of
the corpus (black nodes are spam, white nodes are non-spam):

http://www.yr-bcn.es/webspam/graphs/spamgraph_uk2006.jpg

The organizers of the Web Spam Challenge provide the graph, training
labels, the contents for the pages, and a set of pre-computed feature
vectors. The goal is to predict the label (non-spam or spam) for a test set
of hosts for which labels are not given. For more information, check the
challenge web site at this address:

http://webspam.lip6.fr/

See you in Banff!