Exception while starting spring web mvc application

The key statement of your stack trace is:

java.lang.AbstractMethodError: org.hibernate.validator.internal.engine.ConfigurationImpl.getDefaultParameterNameProvider()Ljavax/validation/ParameterNameProvider;

This answer seems also to apply to your problem description/exception message: You have a conflicting javax.validation version!

Hint: I prefer Netbeans' "Graph View" (of a pom editor) for identification & elimination of dependency conflicts (especially after some version upgrade). The "pure-maven-way" would be:

mvn dependency:tree -Dverbose -Dincludes=javax.validation