Automatic topics identification for reviewer assignment

Abstract

Scientific conference management involves many complex and multi-faceted activities, which would make highly desirable for the organizing people to have a Web-based management system that makes some of them a little easier to carry out. One of such activities is the assignment of submitted papers to suitable reviewers, involving the authors, the reviewers and the conference chair. Authors that submit the papers usually must fill a form with paper title, abstract and a set of conference topics that fit their submission subject. Reviewers are required to register and declare their expertise on the conference topics (among other things). Finally, the conference chair has to carry out the review assignment taking into account the information provided by both the authors (about their paper) and the reviewers (about their competencies). Thus, all this subtasks needed for the assignment are currently carried out manually by the actors. While this can be just boring in the case of authors and reviewers, in case of conference chair the task is also very complex and time-consuming. In this paper we propose the exploitation of intelligent techniques to automatically extract paper topics from their title and abstract, and the expertise of the reviewers from the titles of their publications available on the Internet. Successively, such a knowledge is exploited by an expert system able to automatically perform the assignments. The proposed methods were evaluated on a real conference dataset obtaining good results when compared to handmade ones, both in terms of quality and user-satisfaction of the assignments, and for reduction in execution time with respect to the case of humans performing the same process. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.