@inproceedings{liu-etal-2026-rate,
title = "{RATE}: Reviewer Profiling and Annotation-free Training for Expertise Ranking in Peer Review Systems",
author = "Liu, Weicong and
Yang, Zixuan and
Zhao, Yibo and
Li, Xiang",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.2035/",
pages = "43978--43996",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
abstract = "Reviewer assignment is increasingly critical yet challenging in the LLM era, where rapid topic shifts render many pre-2023 benchmarks outdated and where proxy signals poorly reflect true reviewer familiarity. We address this evaluation bottleneck by introducing LR-bench, a high-fidelity, up-to-date benchmark curated from 2024{--}2025 AI/NLP manuscripts with five-level self-assessed familiarity ratings collected via a large-scale email survey, yielding 1,055 expert-annotated paper{--}reviewer{--}score annotations. We further propose a reviewer-centric ranking framework that distills each reviewer{'}s recent publications into compact keyword-based profiles and fine-tunes an embedding model with weak preference supervision constructed from heuristic retrieval signals, enabling to match each manuscript against a reviewer profile directly. Across the LR-bench and the CMU gold-standard dataset, our approach consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong embedding baselines by a clear margin. We release LR-bench at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Gnociew/LR-bench, and an github repository at https://github.com/Gnociew/RATE-Reviewer-Assignment."
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<abstract>Reviewer assignment is increasingly critical yet challenging in the LLM era, where rapid topic shifts render many pre-2023 benchmarks outdated and where proxy signals poorly reflect true reviewer familiarity. We address this evaluation bottleneck by introducing LR-bench, a high-fidelity, up-to-date benchmark curated from 2024–2025 AI/NLP manuscripts with five-level self-assessed familiarity ratings collected via a large-scale email survey, yielding 1,055 expert-annotated paper–reviewer–score annotations. We further propose a reviewer-centric ranking framework that distills each reviewer’s recent publications into compact keyword-based profiles and fine-tunes an embedding model with weak preference supervision constructed from heuristic retrieval signals, enabling to match each manuscript against a reviewer profile directly. Across the LR-bench and the CMU gold-standard dataset, our approach consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong embedding baselines by a clear margin. We release LR-bench at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Gnociew/LR-bench, and an github repository at https://github.com/Gnociew/RATE-Reviewer-Assignment.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T RATE: Reviewer Profiling and Annotation-free Training for Expertise Ranking in Peer Review Systems
%A Liu, Weicong
%A Yang, Zixuan
%A Zhao, Yibo
%A Li, Xiang
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-390-6
%F liu-etal-2026-rate
%X Reviewer assignment is increasingly critical yet challenging in the LLM era, where rapid topic shifts render many pre-2023 benchmarks outdated and where proxy signals poorly reflect true reviewer familiarity. We address this evaluation bottleneck by introducing LR-bench, a high-fidelity, up-to-date benchmark curated from 2024–2025 AI/NLP manuscripts with five-level self-assessed familiarity ratings collected via a large-scale email survey, yielding 1,055 expert-annotated paper–reviewer–score annotations. We further propose a reviewer-centric ranking framework that distills each reviewer’s recent publications into compact keyword-based profiles and fine-tunes an embedding model with weak preference supervision constructed from heuristic retrieval signals, enabling to match each manuscript against a reviewer profile directly. Across the LR-bench and the CMU gold-standard dataset, our approach consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong embedding baselines by a clear margin. We release LR-bench at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Gnociew/LR-bench, and an github repository at https://github.com/Gnociew/RATE-Reviewer-Assignment.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.2035/
%P 43978-43996
Markdown (Informal)
[RATE: Reviewer Profiling and Annotation-free Training for Expertise Ranking in Peer Review Systems](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.2035/) (Liu et al., ACL 2026)
ACL