Assigning papers to referees

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.