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

Laurent Charlin, Richard Zemel

Decision: oral

Abstract: One of the most important tasks of conference organizers is the assignment of papers to reviewers. Reviewers' assessments of papers is a crucial step in determining the conference 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 impossible for one person to accomplish. 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 that we have been using, as well as some of the recent progress and open issues.