Multi-Aspect Review-Team Assignment using Latent Research Areas

Reviewer assignment is an important task in many research-related activities, such as conference organization and grant-proposal adjudication. The goal is to assign each submitted artifact to a set of reviewers who can thoroughly evaluate all aspects of the artifact's content, while, at the same time, balancing the workload of the reviewers. In this paper, we focus on textual artifacts such as conference papers, where both (aspects of) the submitted papers and (expertise areas of) the reviewers can be described with terms and/or topics extracted from the text. We propose a method for automatically assigning a team of reviewers to each submitted paper, based on the clusters of the reviewers' publications as latent research areas. Our method extends the definition of the relevance score between reviewers and papers using the latent research areas information to find a team of reviewers for each paper, such that each individual reviewer and the team as a whole cover as many paper aspects as possible. To solve the constrained problem where each reviewer has a limited reviewing capacity, we utilize a greedy algorithm that starts with a group of reviewers for each paper and iteratively evolves it to improve the coverage of the papers' topics by the reviewers' expertise. We experimentally demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches w.r.t several standard quality measures.