Expert suggestion for conference program committees

Abstract

With the rapid development of science, the academic community requires higher and higher quality of the published articles. This great responsibility is placed on editorial boards of journals, on program committees of conferences and their members. In addition, with a large number of scientific conferences held each year, searching for experts that would be invited to join the program committees is an increasingly hard task. In this paper, we propose an expert modelling method on different indicators of expertise, in particular on citation networks in order to build suggestions of members for program committees of conferences. Contrary to most of the works about expert search in the literature which are based on textual sources of evidence to define the expertise of an expert candidate, our model leverages non-textual indicators only. We evaluate the proximity of an expert candidate according to the weights of his/her various relations with the conference for which the candidate is proposed to be member of the next program committee. We report various experiments in the context of the SIGIR conference editions. These experiments give hints on the composition of program committees and on the effectiveness of our approach.