An Exploratory Study on Content-Based Filtering of Call for Papers

Due to the increasing number of conferences, researchers need to spend more and more time browsing through the respective calls for papers (CFPs) to identify those conferences which might be of interest to them. In this paper we study several content-based techniques to filter CFPs retrieved from the web. To this end, we explore how to exploit the information available in a typical CFP: a short introductory text, topics in the scope of the conference, and the names of the people in the program committee. While the introductory text and the topics can be directly used to model the document (e.g. to derive a tf-idf weighted vector), the names of the members of the program committee can be used in several indirect ways. One strategy we pursue in particular is to take into account the papers that these people have recently written. Along similar lines, to find out the research interests of the users, and thus to decide which CFPs to select, we look at the abstracts of the papers that they have recently written. We compare and contrast a number of approaches based on the vector space model and on generative language models.