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About ICWSM
The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) is a forum for researchers from multiple disciplines to come together to share knowledge, discuss ideas, exchange information, and learn about cutting-edge research in diverse fields with the common theme of investigating the interplay of web and society. This overall theme includes research on new perspectives in social theories, as well as computational algorithms for analyzing digital traces of human activities or behaviors in social settings. ICWSM is a singularly fitting venue for research that blends social science and computational approaches to answer important and challenging questions about human social behavior through online traces while advancing computational tools for vast and unstructured data.
ICWSM, now in its twentieth year, has become one of the premier venues for computational social science and social computing. Previous years of ICWSM have featured papers, posters, and demos that draw upon a wide spectrum of disciplines from computational sciences (e.g., network science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, text/data mining, natural language processing, image/multimedia processing, human computer interaction) to social sciences (e.g., sociology, communication, political science, anthropology, psychology, economics, digital humanities). Note that papers focusing solely on the advancement of algorithmic components, or which use Web data only as an artifact (for instance, in method evaluation) are out of scope. Ideal submissions should speak to research questions of societal relevance.
We invite original work that utilizes diverse digitally mediated data sources such as web navigation traces, traces from apps, social media traces, data from online platforms such as microblogs (e.g., X/ formerly Twitter), wiki-based knowledge sharing sites (e.g., Wikipedia), online news media (e.g., Huffington Post), forums, mailing lists, newsgroups, community media sites (e.g., YouTube, Instagram), Q&A sites (e.g., Quora, Stack Overflow), user review sites (e.g., Yelp, Amazon.com), search platforms and social curation sites (e.g., Reddit, Pinterest). Adapting to our continuously evolving field, we are open to new forms of technologically mediated human or society-related data sources (e.g., mobility traces, satellite data) and methods that advance our understanding of society and the influence of the web on it.
The uniqueness of the venue and the quality of submissions have contributed to a rapidly growing conference, and a competitive acceptance rate of approximately 20 to 30% for full-length research papers published in the proceedings by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
Conference Topics
ICWSM encourages submissions across diverse research areas. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
- Social network analysis and community detection
- Information diffusion and viral phenomena in the web or online social spaces
- Sentiment analysis, opinion mining, and stance identification
- Misinformation, fact-checking, and credibility of online content
- Web mining, information extraction, and information retrieval on online platforms
- Privacy and security on the web
- Digital humanities and cultural analytics using online traces
- Political communication, civic engagement, and predictability of real-world phenomena using or related to web or digital-trace data
- Health and well-being in digital spaces
- Text categorization, topic recognition, and demographic identification using online behavior or digital-trace data
- Trend identification, tracking, and time series forecasting for web data
- Analysis of the relationship between social media and mainstream media
- Qualitative and quantitative studies of online platforms
- Linguistic analyses of human behavior on the web
- Psychological, personality-based, and ethnographic studies of web-based platforms
- Engagement, motivations, incentives, and gamification on the web
- Social innovation and effecting change through the web
- New web applications, interfaces, and interaction techniques
- Internet usage on mobile devices, location, and human mobility
- Organizational and group behavior mediated by web technology
- Interpersonal communication mediated by web and social media
In recent submission cycles, we have seen an increase in papers that are focused more on large language models rather than on how this technology is situated within the online information environment or how this technology impacts online spaces. Following our evaluation of these papers and community feedback over the past few ICWSM conferences, we are therefore clarifying the following policy on the kinds of LLM papers that are explicitly out of scope for ICWSM:
- Using LLMs as tools to process web and social media (W&SM) data to make contributions about the nature, structure, or performance of LLMs without an evaluation on W&SM data
- Proposing an LLM tool for a task related to the analysis of W&SM and testing it on non-W&SM data
- Proposing an LLM tool for a task not related to the analysis of W&SM
- Using LLM as a tool to process non-W&SM data to make any sort of conclusions
Papers that fall into these categories will be desk rejected early in the review process.