Using word clouds for fast identification of papers' subject domain and reviewers' competences

Generating word (tag) clouds is a powerful data visualization technique that allows people to get easily acquainted with the content of a large collection of textual documents and identify their subject domains for a matter of seconds, without reading them at all. This paper suggests applying word clouds visualization to conference management systems (specialized document management and decision support systems) in order to support and facilitate decision making in at least two important processes - forming the Programme Committee by inviting suitable reviewers and manual (re)assignment of reviewers to papers. Word clouds proved to be very useful tool for fast identification of papers' subject domain and reviewers' competences.