Reviewer Assignment
The Reviewer Assignment tab is where you match reviewers to papers — prepare the data (embeddings, affinity, conflicts), run the matching solver with your constraints, then approve, edit, or hand-pick the resulting assignments.
Purpose
The Reviewer Assignment tab is where you turn a pile of submissions and a roster of reviewers into a concrete set of paper-to-reviewer assignments. It runs as a three-stage pipeline:
- Pre-Assignment — compute AI embeddings for submissions and reviewers, then use them to calculate affinity scores (how well a reviewer's expertise matches a paper) and detect conflicts of interest (co-authors, shared institutions, declared conflicts).
- Run Assignment — configure your constraints (reviewers per paper, papers per reviewer, affinity threshold, solver algorithm, optional bidding) and run the matching solver to generate assignments.
- Manage Assignments — review the generated assignments in a Paper or Reviewer view, bulk-approve suggestions, fine-tune individual assignments, or hand-pick reviewers in Manual Assignment.
This tab appears in Full tier programs running the Direct review mode. The work it produces feeds the Reviews tab and the Review Status dashboards.
When you use it
Open Reviewer Assignment once submissions are in and your review committee is set up — typically right after the submission deadline. Use it to:
- Prepare the matching data (embeddings, affinity, conflicts) before assignments can run.
- Generate a full set of assignments automatically, then approve them.
- Spot-fix coverage gaps or conflicts by editing or manually assigning reviewers.
The pre-assignment and assignment steps can also auto-run after the submission deadline (and, if your program uses a bid stage, after bidding closes). The tab shows the schedule and lets you run any step manually whenever you need to.
Walkthrough
- 1
Open the Program Chair Console and select the program you want to manage (if you chair more than one), then click the Reviewer Assignment tab.
- 2
On Matching & Assignment → Pre-Assignment, run Step 1: Compute Embeddings (use Run Both Steps to do submissions then reviewers in one go), then Step 2: Affinity & Conflicts to score every reviewer-paper pair and flag conflicts. The Results & Readiness card shows Connections, With Affinity, Avg Score, and Conflicts so you know the data is ready.
- 3
Switch to Run Assignment. Click Configure to set your constraints — Target / Min / Max reviewers per paper, Min / Max papers per reviewer, the Min Affinity Threshold, the solver algorithm (MINMAX, FAIRFLOW, FAIRIR, or RANDOMIZED), and whether to use reviewer bidding — then click Run Assignment.
- 4
If your average affinity is below the configured threshold, a warning offers an auto-adjusted threshold. Accept it to avoid an infeasible run, or Dismiss to keep your original setting.
- 5
Go to Manage Assignments to review the results. Toggle between Paper View and Reviewer View, then click Approve All Suggested to accept everything, or use the per-row Approve and Edit buttons to refine.
- 6
Use Edit on any row to add reviewers via search, approve or decline individual suggestions, or remove an assignment. For full hand control, use the Manual Assignment section to pick reviewer-paper pairs directly.
Tips
Affinity and conflicts depend on embeddings, and the solver depends on affinity. Use the Run Both Steps shortcuts in Pre-Assignment so you don't run the solver against missing data. The Readiness card tells you when each stage is complete.
The solver produces suggested assignments (blue) that don't take effect until you approve them — they become assigned (green). Conflicts show in red. Use the ? Assignment Status Guide in the table header if a badge is unclear.
A high Min Affinity Threshold can leave papers uncovered or make the run infeasible. If the threshold warning appears, accepting the recommended value is usually the safest path; lower the threshold or relax per-paper minimums if coverage is still incomplete.