WSDM Cup 2016-Entity Ranking Challenge

In this paper, we describe the WSDM Cup entity ranking challenge held in conjunction with the 2016 Web Search and Data Mining conference (WSDM 2016). Participants in the challenge were provided access to the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), a large heterogeneous graph of academic entities, and were invited to calculate the query-independent importance of each publication in the graph. Submissions for the challenge were open from August through November 2015, and a public leaderboard displayed teams' progress against a set of training judgements. Final evaluations were performed against a separate, withheld portion of the evaluation judgements. The top eight performing teams were then invited to submit papers to the WSDM Cup workshop, held at the WSDM 2016 conference.