Automatic Reviews' Assignments through Answer Set Programming

The problem of automatically assigning reviews is a crucial task in conference management. Not only is it a time-consuming and challenging task, but it is also one of the most important peculiarities that contribute to the good/bad organisation of the conference, not to mention the degree of satisfaction of the people involved. During review assignments, many constraints come into play: the maximum number of papers per reviewer, the minimum number of reviews per paper, conflict handling and, last but not least, the similarity between papers' topics and reviews' interests. In this paper, we propose a strategy to map topics using the ACM Computing taxonomy, and a modelization of the problem in a Constraint Satisfaction setting relying on the Answer Set Programming (ASP) logical framework. This strategy, although not scalable, showed the capability of managing many real situations that have not been captured so far. Experiments demonstrated the goodness of performances for small/medium numbers of papers.