Reviewer assignment problem: A scoping review

Peer review is an integral component of scientific research. The quality of peer review, and consequently the published research, depends to a large extent on the ability to recruit adequate reviewers for submitted papers. However, finding such reviewers is an increasingly difficult task due to several factors, such as the continuous increase both in the production of scientific papers and the workload of scholars. To mitigate these challenges, solutions for automated association of papers with "well matching" reviewers - the task often referred to as reviewer assignment problem (RAP) - have been the subject of research for thirty years now. Even though numerous solutions have been suggested, to our knowledge, a recent systematic synthesis of the RAP-related literature is missing. To fill this gap and support further RAP-related research, in this paper, we present a scoping review of computational approaches for addressing RAP. Following the latest methodological guidance for scoping reviews, we have collected recent literature on RAP from three databases (Scopus, Google Scholar, DBLP) and, after applying the eligibility criteria, retained 26 studies for extracting and synthesising data on several aspects of RAP research including: i) the overall framing of and approach to RAP; ii) the criteria for reviewer selection; iii) the modelling of candidate reviewers and submissions; iv) the computational methods for matching reviewers and submissions; and v) the methods for evaluating the performance of the proposed solutions. The paper summarises and discusses the findings for each of the aforementioned aspects of RAP research and suggests future research directions.

Open Information Extraction

Open Information Extraction (Open IE) systems aim to obtain relation tuples with highly scalable extraction in portable across domain by identifying a variety of relation phrases and their arguments in arbitrary sentences. The first generation of Open IE learns linear chain models based on unlexicalized features such as Part-of-Speech (POS) or shallow tags to label the intermediate words between pair of potential arguments for identifying extractable relations. Open IE currently is developed in the second generation that is able to extract instances of the most frequently observed relation types such as Verb, Noun and Prep, Verb and Prep, and Infinitive with deep linguistic analysis. They expose simple yet principled ways in which verbs express relationships in linguistics such as verb phrase-based extraction or clause-based extraction. They obtain a significantly higher performance over previous systems in the first generation. In this paper, we describe an overview of two Open IE generations including strengths, weaknesses and application areas.