Decision support system for assignment of conference papers to reviewers

Abstract

Research conferences are held to share research progress and novel findings among scientists and encourage the growth of academic communities. Assigning papers to reviewers is the most critical and arduous task for conference organizers. Usually, conference committees must distribute hundreds of publications to reviewers in a short time. Moreover, other restrictions—such as a limited number of reviewers and avoiding conflict of interest—make the process of wholly distributed more difficult. Manually choosing reviewers can be an unfair and time-consuming process. In this study, we developed a support system for automatically assigning submitted papers to reviewers. For this, we extracted features from reviewer profiles and their networks to compute their quality and relevance with respect to the submitted papers. Experiments on a DBLP dataset showed that our system achieved more accurate results than other methods.