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arXiv · 2609.06604

TaxoConf: Taxonomy-Guided Automatic Conference Program Organization

Daomin Ji·Zhifeng Bao·Junhao Gan
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Abstract

Conference program organization, the task of assembling accepted papers into a technical program, is labor-intensive. Papers must be grouped into topically coherent sessions under hard operational constraints, and existing methods rarely achieve both at once. To address this problem, we present TaxoConf, a system that organizes conference programs around a conference-specific topic taxonomy. TaxoConf constructs a canonicalized multi-parent taxonomy over the accepted papers and represents each paper by its frontier of most specific topics. It derives a specificity-weighted optimal-transport distance between papers from this taxonomy, then solves a binary integer programming problem that assigns papers to sessions by minimizing within-session distance subject to all hard constraints. On benchmarks built from four 2025 conferences, TaxoConf attains the highest session coherence (4.62 out of 5) and the closest agreement with human-curated sessions (NMI 0.761) while incurring no constraint violations. TaxoConf has also been deployed to generate the technical program of SIGIR 2026, where the organizers accepted the initial output with only a few edits, preserving 91.8% of oral assignments and the entire poster program while requiring no correction of hard-constraint violations, and an on-site survey of 47 attendees rated the overall program quality 4.26 out of 5. The system is publicly available at https://taxoconf.com.

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Daomin Ji, Zhifeng Bao, Junhao Gan. 2026-09-06. TaxoConf: Taxonomy-Guided Automatic Conference Program Organization. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06604

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