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Assigning Papers to Referees
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  • Open Access
  • Published: 12 January 2010

Assigning Papers to Referees

  • Naveen Garg1,
  • Telikepalli Kavitha2,
  • Amit Kumar1,
  • Kurt Mehlhorn3 &
  • …
  • Julián Mestre3 

Algorithmica volume 58, pages 119–136 (2010)Cite this article

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Abstract

Refereed conferences require every submission to be reviewed by members of a program committee (PC) in charge of selecting the conference program. There are many software packages available to manage the review process. Typically, in a bidding phase PC members express their personal preferences by ranking the submissions. This information is used by the system to compute an assignment of the papers to referees (PC members).

We study the problem of assigning papers to referees. We propose to optimize a number of criteria that aim at achieving fairness among referees/papers. Some of these variants can be solved optimally in polynomial time, while others are NP-hard, in which case we design approximation algorithms. Experimental results strongly suggest that the assignments computed by our algorithms are considerably better than those computed by popular conference management software.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India

    Naveen Garg & Amit Kumar

  2. Department of Computer Science and Automation, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India

    Telikepalli Kavitha

  3. Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken, 66123, Germany

    Kurt Mehlhorn & Julián Mestre

Authors
  1. Naveen Garg
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  2. Telikepalli Kavitha
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  3. Amit Kumar
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  4. Kurt Mehlhorn
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  5. Julián Mestre
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Julián Mestre.

Additional information

J. Mestre’s research is supported by an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship.

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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

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Cite this article

Garg, N., Kavitha, T., Kumar, A. et al. Assigning Papers to Referees. Algorithmica 58, 119–136 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-009-9386-0

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  • Received: 30 December 2008

  • Accepted: 23 December 2009

  • Published: 12 January 2010

  • Issue Date: September 2010

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-009-9386-0

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Keywords

  • Fair assignment
  • Rank-maximal matchings
  • Leximin principle
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