Recommender Systems for the Conference Paper Assignment Problem

Conference paper assignment, i.e., the task of assigning paper submissions to reviewers, presents multi-faceted issues for recommender systems research. Besides the traditional goal of predicting `who likes what?', a conference management system must take into account aspects such as: reviewer capacity constraints, adequate numbers of reviews for papers, expertise modeling, conflicts of interest, and an overall distribution of assignments that balances reviewer preferences with conference objectives. Among these, issues of modeling preferences and tastes in reviewing have traditionally been studied separately from the optimization of paper-reviewer assignment. In this paper, we present an integrated study of both these aspects. First, due to the paucity of data per reviewer or per paper (relative to other recommender systems applications) we show how we can integrate multiple sources of information to learn paper-reviewer preference models. Second, our models are evaluated not just in terms of prediction accuracy but in terms of the end-assignment quality. Using a linear programming-based assignment optimization formulation, we show how our approach better explores the space of unsupplied assignments to maximize the overall affinities of papers assigned to reviewers. We demonstrate our results on real reviewer preference data from the IEEE ICDM 2007 conference.