Motivated by the common academic problem of allocating papers to referees for conference reviewing we propose a novel mechanism for solving the assignment problem when we have a two sided matching problem with preferences from one side (the agents reviewers) over the other side (the objects papers) and both sides have capacity constraints. The assignment problem is a fundamental problem in both computer science and economics with application in many areas including task and resource allocation. We draw inspiration from multi-criteria decision making and voting and use order weighted averages (OWAs) to propose a novel and flexible class of algorithms for the assignment problem. We show an algorithm for finding a @math -OWA assignment in polynomial time, in contrast to the NP-hardness of finding an egalitarian assignment. Inspired by this setting we observe an interesting connection between our model and the classic proportional multi-winner election problem in social choice.
We present a recommender systems approach to conference paper assignment, i.e., the task of assigning paper submissions to reviewers. We address both the modeling of reviewer-paper preferences (which can be cast as a learning problem) and the optimization of reviewing assignments to satisfy global conference criteria (which can be viewed as constraint satisfaction). Due to the paucity of preference data per reviewer or per paper (relative to other recommender systems applications) we show how we can integrate multiple sources of information to learn reviewer-paper preference models. Our models are evaluated not just in terms of prediction accuracy but in terms of end-assignment quality. Using a linear programming-based assignment optimization, 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 bidding data from the IEEE ICDM 2007 conference. At the heart of many scientific conferences is the problem of matching submitted papers to suitable reviewers. Arriving at a good assignment is a major and important challenge for any conference organizer. In this paper we propose a framework to optimize paper-to-reviewer assignments. Our framework uses suitability scores to measure pairwise affinity between papers and reviewers. We show how learning can be used to infer suitability scores from a small set of provided scores, thereby reducing the burden on reviewers and organizers. We frame the assignment problem as an integer program and propose several variations for the paper-to-reviewer matching domain. We also explore how learning and matching interact. Experiments on two conference data sets examine the performance of several learning methods as well as the effectiveness of the matching formulations.