Identifying expertise through semantic modeling: A modified BBPSO algorithm for the reviewer assignment problem

Reviewers play a significant role in academic peer review activities, including conference paper assignment and funding selection, because their evaluation of proposals impacts the final decision. Several studies have proposed reviewer selection strategies or reviewer evaluation methods for solving the problem of selecting appropriate reviewers. Identifying reviewers who are familiar with the proposals to be reviewed is the objective of the reviewer assignment problem. However, the majority of the existing studies ignore quantitative constraints with respect to the articles assigned to the reviewers during the review process. In this study, we propose a novel optimization model with several review condition constraints to address the reviewer assignment problem. In the proposed model, the expertise and research areas of the candidate reviewers and proposals are identified using semantic topic models, which are demonstrated to be effective when measuring the relevance of the reviewers with respect to the proposals to be reviewed; further, the computational efficiency is improved owing to the reduced representation dimensionality. Herein, an improved heuristic algorithm is proposed to match reviewers and papers based on specific topic areas, and candidate reviewers are assigned to each proposal under the global optimum condition based on their overall performance values. Subsequently, an empirical test is conducted using a conference reviewer dataset. The obtained results show that the proposed model can help the managers to efficiently and effectively select reviewers in terms of the convergence rate and convergence level when compared with several classic benchmarks.