Describing Papers and Reviewers' Competences by Taxonomy of Keywords

This article focuses on the importance of the precise calculation of similarity factors between papers and reviewers for performing a fair and accurate automatic assignment of reviewers to papers. It suggests that papers and reviewers’ competences should be described by taxonomy of keywords so that the implied hierarchical structure allows similarity measures to take into account not only the number of exactly matching keywords, but in case of non-matching ones to calculate how semantically close they are. The paper also suggests a similarity measure derived from the well-known and widely-used Dice's coefficient, but adapted in a way it could be also applied between sets whose elements are semantically related to each other (as concepts in taxonomy are). It allows a non-zero similarity factor to be accurately calculated between a paper and a reviewer even if they do not share any keyword in common.