CALL FOR PAPERS

We invite contributions to the research tracks of The Web Conference 2024 (formerly known as WWW). The conference will take place in Singapore, from May 13 to 17, 2024.

The Web Conference is the premier conference focused on understanding the current state and the evolution of the Web through the lens of computer science, computational social science, economics, policy, and many other disciplines.

Important Dates

  • Abstract: Thursday, October 5, 2023
  • Full paper: Thursday, October 12, 2023
  • Author and reviewer discussion: December 1-14, 2023
  • Notification: February 1, 2024

All submission deadlines are end-of-day in the Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone.

Submission Site

We will use OpenReview to manage the submissions and reviewing. All listed authors must have an up-to-date OpenReview profile, properly attributed with current and past institutional affiliation, homepage, Google Scholar, DBLP, ORCID, LinkedIn, Semantic Scholar (wherever applicable). Here is information on how to create an OpenReview profile. The OpenReview profile will be used to handle conflict of interest and paper matching. Submissions will not be made public on OpenReview during the reviewing period.

Abstracts and papers can be submitted through the OpenReview link: https://openreview.net/group?id=ACM.org/TheWebConf/2024/Conference.

Scope

The scope of the conference is the Web and how it has crucially enabled new research and applications. While the Web feeds on and is part of a broader interdisciplinary ecosystem, including technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and many others, it remains a distinct scholarly field, with its own research methods, tools, and challenges.

A typical Web Conference paper should have explicit focus on at least one of the following:

  • understanding, evaluating, and improving the Web as a technical infrastructure; including core Web technologies, standards, and platforms
  • understanding, evaluating, and improving the Web as a socio-economic system;
  • understanding better the impact of the Web and Web technologies;
  • democratizing access to Web content and technologies, making it more accessible, fair, inclusive, and accountable to a wide range of audiences.

Tracks. Our research interests are organized in the following tracks:

The Web has served as a platform for large-scale online markets such as cloud computing, crowdsourcing, and the sharing economy. This growth highlights the importance of understanding the economics of the Web, and we welcome innovative research in this space.

This track is a forum for theoretical, empirical, and applied research related to the modeling, analysis, and design of Web-related economic activities, online markets, and human computation.

The relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Economic ramifications for generative AI in web-based environments

  • Fundamental research challenges in web-based human computation research and crowdsourcing including, but not limited to:

    • mechanisms, frameworks, and architectures;
    • incentives for user-generated content (e.g., integrity, ratings, reviews, and reputation systems);
    • fairness and other ethical considerations (e.g., workers’/tasks’ starvation, fairness in collaborative learning); and
    • applications

  • Information design in web-based environments including, but not limited to,

    • web hosted datasets; and
    • the data economy in web based platforms

  • Economics and fairness of web-based recommendation systems

  • Fairness, privacy, and diversity in economic environments

  • Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems

  • Economics of cloud computing

  • Advertising auctions, markets, and exchanges

  • The sharing economy

  • Incentives in gamification

  • Sustainability of Web economics

  • Economic aspects of Web and mobile app ecosystems

Senior Area Chairs:

Contact: TheWebConf24-Econ@ACM.org

We encourage submissions that address a Web-related scientific challenge in graph algorithms, graph mining, and graph learning.

The relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Algorithms for Web graph representation, reconstruction, subgraph and motif discovery
  • Analysis of heterogeneous, signed, attributed, and annotated graphs
  • Succinct data structures for the manipulation of static and dynamic large graphs
  • Multi-relational graph analysis
  • Querying and indexing algorithms for massive graphs
  • Deep learning for Web graphs
  • Network representation learning for the Web
  • Graph embeddings and GNNs for the Web
  • Mining and learning in graphs with missing information and noise

Senior Area Chairs:

Contact: TheWebConf24-Graph@ACM.org

We invite research contributions to the Responsible Web track. Over the past decades, the Web and internet have grown to be an integral part of our lives. Through this track we aim to surface the latest research on what it means to build a responsible web and internet, one that leaves no one behind and is inclusive, equitable, fair, ethical, open, privacy-preserving and trustworthy.

The relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Audits of web technologies, standards, platforms, and applications
  • Fairness, accountability, transparency and ethics of web technologies, standards, platforms and applications
  • Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web
  • Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
  • Social and technical mechanisms of refusal for web technologies and applications
  • Consent frameworks and practices on the web
  • Algorithmic accountability and transparency on the web
  • Ethical and legal aspects of web-scale data analysis, uses and collection practices
  • Implications and mitigation strategies for potentially conflicting goals, such as fairness and privacy or transparency and fraud protection
  • Abusive content such as online harassment, spam, and fake reviews
  • Misinformation and disinformation
  • Data and user privacy
  • Privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web and mobile app ecosystem
  • Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship
  • User consent management

Senior Area Chairs:

Contact: TheWebConf24-RespWeb@ACM.org

This track welcomes submissions of original, high-quality research related to the search and retrieval of Web content.

The relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Web query analysis, representation and understanding
  • Web search models and ranking
  • Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
  • Web crawling and indexing
  • Assisted, interactive, and conversational search
  • Personalized, context-aware and across-device search
  • Efficiency and scalability of Web search engines
  • Vertical and domain-specific search
  • Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search
  • Web learning to rank, online learning, and counterfactual learning for ranking
  • Web question answering
  • Ad search and search for Web retail
  • Natural language understanding for Web search
  • Large language models for search

Senior Area Chairs:

Contact: TheWebConf24-Search@ACM.org

This track offers researchers working on security the opportunity to present their work to the broad community of researchers interested in issues of security relating to the Web.

The relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Applications of cryptography
  • Authentication, authorization and access control
  • Blockchains and distributed ledgers
  • Browser and end-point security
  • Cyber-crime defenses and forensics
  • Cryptocurrency and smart contracts
  • Data security
  • Data transparency and provenance
  • Large-scale, security measurements
  • Security in web-based applications and services
  • Tracking, profiling, and countermeasures against them

Senior Area Chairs:

Contact: TheWebConf24-Security@ACM.org

This track is a forum to gather researchers interested in knowledge graphs and other forms of structured data models with machine-interpretable semantics that are being widely adopted for many advanced applications on the Web. In this track we invite original research submissions related to methods, algorithms, techniques and applications supporting the creation, acquisition, publication and consumption of interlinked structured data corpora – available on the web, the (human-assisted) semantic integration, the enrichment and processing of large, real-world datasets in a Web context.

The relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Scalable techniques for the creation, curation, publication, maintenance, and consumption of large, Web-based, structured, reusable, knowledge graphs and ontologies

  • Representation, semantic annotation, enhancement, enrichments, access and/or integration of a variety of data on the Web, including, but not limited to, semi-structured data, tabular data, text, multimedia (images, sound, videos) and sensor data

  • Data modeling in support of intelligent system behavior, explanations and user-friendly interaction

  • Methods, algorithms and applications for the development of semantic models, knowledge graphs and other forms of structured data models with machine-interpretable semantics

  • Methods for hybridizing knowledge graphs, semantic models and foundational models being LLM or multimodal models

  • Provenance, trust, security and privacy, and ethical issues in managing semantic data

  • Applications of semantic technologies for improving search, browsing, personalization in applications and domains of interest to the Web community.

Senior Area Chairs:

Contact: TheWebConf24-Semantics@ACM.org

We welcome submissions in all areas that concern social networks, social media, and the interaction of the Web and society.

The relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Social media analysis through the lenses of networks
  • Analysis of web-mediated communications, communities, and crowds
  • Social mining and social search on the Web
  • Influence propagation, information diffusion, and the prediction on networks (link prediction, node or subgraph prediction)
  • Computational social science (e.g., computational politics, propaganda, sociology, communication studies, media science, humanities, arts, and culture on the Web)
  • Socio-technical web-based systems
  • Media and governance (e.g., opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization, conflicts or tribalization, self-governance, civic engagement, collective actions via the Web)
  • Fairness and bias in social network and social media analysis
  • Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems
  • Applications and emergent phenomena (e.g., massive multiplayer games, massive courses, forums, and others, the dark Web, Web-enabled humanitarian action, online health)

Senior Area Chairs:

Contact: TheWebConf24-Social@ACM.org

This track solicits novel research contributions describing the construction of systems architecture, and performance related to the Web, and Web-based mobile and ubiquitous computing. The track welcomes submissions of interest not only to academic but also industrial researchers, with works that contribute to the understanding of Web, mobile, and WoT systems, e.g., via data analysis, experimental findings, novel implementations, deployment experiences, lessons learned, measurement studies, and usability evaluations.

The relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Cloud, edge and content delivery systems for the Web
  • Decentralized Web and Fediverse systems
  • Federated Web systems, including distributed, federated and edge-based data processing, learning, and systems for Web and WoT.
  • Virtualization and resource management in Web systems and infrastructures
  • Web performance, measurements, and characterization
  • Location- and context-aware Web and WoT applications and services
  • Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
  • Novel mobile and WoT systems, or system-of-systems
  • Web applications in cross-disciplinary domains and verticals such as augmented/mixed reality, mobility, smart cities, smart health, agritech, fintech, and so on.
  • Data management and stream processing for Web, mobile and wireless applications
  • Experiences and lessons learnt from Web-based algorithms and system deployments

Senior Area Chairs:

Contact: TheWebConf24-Systems@ACM.org

In this track, we invite original research submissions addressing all aspects of user modeling, personalization, inclusive modeling, and system design in the context of the Web.

The relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

  • User model development and offline evaluation
  • User modeling and simulation for interactive and conversational systems
  • Natural language user models and recommender systems
  • Practical large-scale studies of user experience
  • Personalized content ranking and presentation
  • ML for personalized search and recommendations
  • Social recommender systems and personalization for the social Web
  • Psychology-informed user models and recommender systems
  • Metrics for user behavior and evaluating success
  • Fairness-aware retrieval and ranking
  • Explainable and interpretable methods for personalization
  • Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization
  • User privacy protection in personalized systems
  • Studies of user behavior, including longitudinal effects of personalized systems

Senior Area Chairs:

Contact: TheWebConf24-RecSys@ACM.org

This track welcomes submissions of original and high-quality research papers related to the extraction of information from the Web and the analysis and mining of the Web content

The relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

  • ML and data science for the Web
  • Web data integration and cleaning
  • Visualization of Web data
  • Robustness and generalizability of Web mining methods
  • Community question answering
  • Normalization, clustering, classification, and summarization of Web text
  • Topic discovery and tracking
  • Sentiment analysis and opinion mining
  • Content-based information diffusion
  • Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
  • Bridging structured and unstructured data
  • Web traffic and logs analysis
  • Web measurements
  • Models for Web evolution

Senior Area Chairs:

Contact: TheWebConf24-Mining@ACM.org

Relevance. Every submission must clearly state how the work is relevant to the Web and to the track in the first page. Submissions that merely use a Web artifact---e.g., a dataset or a Web Application Programmer Interface (API) or a social network---rather than answering a specific Web-related scientific research challenge, are out of scope and will be desk-rejected.

Submission Guidelines

Deadlines. The submission deadlines are strict and no extensions, regardless of circumstances, will be allowed. Placeholder/dummy abstracts are forbidden.

Authorship. The ACM has an authorship policy stating who can be considered an author in a submission as well as the use of generative AI tools. Every person named as the author of a paper must have contributed substantially to the work described in the paper and/or to the writing of the paper and must take responsibility for the entire content of a paper.

  • Maximum authorship. The number of submissions allowed per author is limited to 9 (nine) maximum, accumulatively across the research tracks. If more than 9 papers are submitted with the same person listed as an author, the additional papers submitted after the first 9 by submission id, will be desk-rejected.

  • Authorship changes. The full list of authors, including the ordering, must be finalized at the point of submission. There cannot be any addition, removal, or reordering of authors after submission time. The only changes allowed are the correction of spelling mistakes or new affiliation.

Anonymity. The review process will be double-blind. The submitted document should omit any author names, affiliations, or other identifying information. This may include, but is not restricted to acknowledgments, self-citations, references to prior work by the author(s), and so on. Please use the third-person to identify your own prior work. You may explicitly refer in the paper to organizations that provided datasets, hosted experiments, or deployed solutions and tools.

Formatting Requirements. Submissions must be in English, in double-column format, and must adhere to the ACM template and format (also available in Overleaf). Word users may use the Word Interim Template and the recommended setting for LaTeX is:

\documentclass\[sigconf, anonymous, review\]{acmart}.

Submissions must be a single PDF file: 8 (eight) pages as main paper, with unlimited pages for references and an optional Appendix (that can contain details on reproducibility, proofs, pseudo-code, etc). The first 8 pages should be self-contained, since reviewers are not required to read past that.

Originality and Concurrent Submissions. Submissions must present original work---this means that papers under review at or published/accepted to any peer-reviewed conference/journal with published proceedings cannot be submitted. Submissions that have been previously presented orally, as posters or abstracts-only, or in non-archival venues with no formal proceedings, including workshops or PhD symposia without proceedings, are allowed. Authors may submit anonymized work that is already available as a preprint (e.g., on arXiv or SSRN) without citing it. The ACM has a strict policy against plagiarism, misrepresentation, and falsification that applies to all publications.

Ethical Use of Data and Informed Consent. Authors are encouraged to include a section on the ethical use of data and/or informed consent of research subjects in their paper, when appropriate. You and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM's Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects (posted in 2021). Please ensure all authors are familiar with these policies.

Please consult the regulations of your institution(s) indicating when a review by an Institutional Ethics Review Board (IRB) is needed. Note that submitting your research for approval by such may not always be sufficient. Even if such research has been approved by your IRB, the program committee might raise additional concerns about the ethical implications of the work and include these concerns in its review.

Submissions that do not follow these guidelines or do not view or print properly, will be desk-rejected.

Reviewing Process

Reviewing. Each paper is submitted to one of the tracks listed above. Papers that do not conform to the conference scope or submission guidelines will be desk-rejected by the track chair (aka Senior Area Chair, SAC). Each submission will receive at least three independent reviews within each track and the process overseen by an Area Chair (AC). Authors may be requested to serve as reviewers.

Rebuttal. Authors will have the chance to provide a response to the reviews during an author-reviewer discussion period. The ACs and SACs will consider the authors' responses to the points raised by the reviewers to inform acceptance decisions.

Decision. A range of factors including technical merit, originality, potential impact, quality of execution, quality of presentation, related work, reproducibility of results, and ethics, will be used by the ACs and SACs to make a recommendation. The PC Chairs will make the final decisions.

Transparency. By submitting paper(s) to The Web Conference 2024, the authors agree that the reviews, meta-reviews, and discussions will be made public in OpenReview for all accepted papers.

Conflict of Interest (COI) Policy

All authors and reviewers must declare conflicts of interest in OpenReview. You must declare a domain conflict (entered in Education & Career History) for employment at the same institution or company, regardless of geography/location, currently or in the last 12 months. You must declare a personal conflict when the following associations exist:

  • candidate for employment at the same institution or company
  • co-author on book/paper or co-PI on a funded grant/research proposal in the last 24 months
  • active collaborator
  • family relationship or close personal relationship
  • graduate advisee/advisor relationship, regardless of time elapsed since graduation
  • deep personal animosity

In general, we expect authors, PC, the organizing committee, and other volunteers to adhere to ACM's Conflict of Interest Policy as well as the ACM's Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.

Publication and Presentation Policies

Publication. All accepted papers will be allowed the same maximum page length in the proceedings (12 pages, of which 8 are content pages), which will be published by ACM and will be accessible via the ACM Digital Library. Accepted papers will require a further revision to meet the requirements of the camera-ready format required by ACM. Camera-ready versions of accepted papers can and should include all information to identify authors, and should acknowledge any funding received that directly supported the presented research. In addition, all papers are required to submit a brief pre-recorded video, which will appear on ACM Digital Library, along with the PDF of the papers.

Registration. To be included in the proceedings, every accepted paper must be covered by a distinct conference registration, e.g., two papers require two registrations, even if they have overlapping authors. This registration must be Full Conference (5-day) or Main Conference (3-day) registration, at the standard (non-student) in-person rate, payment of which must be completed by the camera-ready deadline. This registration requirement applies universally, regardless of attendance or presentation mode.

Presentation. Every accepted paper must be presented at the conference. No-show papers may be withdrawn from the proceedings. There will be two forms of presentation:

  • Oral Presentation. Among the accepted papers, a subset will be selected for oral presentation. Generally we expect oral presentations to be in-person, but may allow a few online presentations by authors with significant travel difficulties.

  • Poster Presentation. All papers will be asked to produce a poster on-site. An e-copy will appear on Whova. To facilitate authors in getting their hard-copy posters on-site, the conference offers a local poster printing service for a fee, which you may access at this link. Organizer will bring the posters on-site.

Reproducibility. Authors are strongly encouraged to make their code and data publicly available after the review process. We are encouraging the (optional) use of the "Artifacts Available" badge in ACM's Digital Library. If you release any code, dataset, or similar artifact to accompany your paper, and host it in a publicly available, archival repository for research artifacts that provides a Document Object Identifier (DOI), you are welcome to apply for this badge. A special subcommittee will check the artifacts of all accepted papers for availability and relatedness to the paper after the acceptance notification.

Program Committee Co-Chairs

Contact: TheWebConf24-pcchairs@ACM.org