The assignment of referees to WSCIO submissions: An evolutionary approach

Abstract

The method used to assign referees to the manuscripts submitted to the 10th online World Conference on Soft Computing (WSC10) is described. Each of the 94 manuscripts received was associated with three unique reviewers from a program committee of 78 persons. A fairly advanced, hand-tuned fitness function based on inverse keyword-frequencies, keyword coverage, and penalties for referee-overuse was used to evolve a satisfactory assignment, via a standard evolutionary algorithm. The resulting referee-to-manuscript matches were hand-adjusted in a small number of cases. In total, only seven assignments (out of more than 280) were declined by referees, and the return-rate for completed reviews was 81%.