The Toronto Paper Matching System: An automated paper-reviewer assignment system

Abstract

One of the most important tasks of conference organizers is the assignment of papers to reviewers. Reviewers ’ assessments of papers isacrucialstepindeterminingtheconference program, and in a certain sense to shape the direction of a field. However this is not a simple task: large conferences typically have to assign hundreds of papers to hundreds of reviewers, and time constraints make the task impossibleforonepersontoaccomplish. Furthermore other constraints, such as reviewer load have to be taken into account, preventing the process from being completely distributed. We built the first version of a system to suggest reviewer assignments for the NIPS 2010 conference, followed, in 2012, by a release that better integrated our system with Microsoft’s popular Conference Management Toolkit (CMT). Since then our system has been widely adopted by the leading conferences in both the machine learning and computer vision communities. This paper provides an overview of the system, a summary of learning models and methods of evaluation thatwehavebeenusing, aswellas some of the recent progress and open issues. 1.