The name disambiguation task partitions a collection of records pertaining to a given name, such that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the partitions and a group of people, all sharing that given name. Most existing solutions for this task are proposed for static data. However, more realistic scenarios stipulate emergence of records in a streaming fashion where records may belong to known as well as unknown persons all sharing the same name. This requires a flexible name disambiguation algorithm that can not only classify records of known persons represented in the train- ing data by their existing records but can also identify records of new ambiguous persons with no existing records included in the initial training dataset. Toward achieving this objective, in this paper we propose a Bayesian non-exhaustive classification frame- work for solving online name disambiguation. In particular, we present a Dirichlet Process Gaussian Mixture Model (DPGMM) as a core engine for online name disambiguation task. Meanwhile, two online inference algorithms, namely one-pass Gibbs sampler and Sequential Importance Sampling with Resampling (also known as particle filtering), are proposed to simultaneously perform online classification and new class discovery. As a case study we consider bibliographic data in a temporal stream format and disambiguate authors by partitioning their papers into homogeneous groups.Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is significantly better than existing methods for performing online name disambiguation task. We also propose an interactive version of our online name disambiguation method designed to leverage user feedback to improve prediction accuracy.
Author name ambiguity in a digital library may affect the findings of research that mines authorship data of the library. This study evaluates author name disambiguation in DBLP, a widely used but insufficiently evaluated digital library for its disambiguation performance. In doing so, this study takes a triangulation approach that author name disambiguation for a digital library can be better evaluated when its performance is assessed on multiple labeled datasets with comparison to baselines. Tested on three types of labeled data containing 5,000 ~ 700K disambiguated names and 6M pairs of dis…
Matching mentions of persons to the actual persons (the name disambiguation problem) is central for several digital library applications. Scientists have been working on algorithms to create this matching for decades without finding a universal solution. One problem is that test collections for this problem are often small and specific to a certain collection. In this work, we present an approach that can create large test collections from historical metadata with minimal extra cost. We apply this approach to the DBLP collection to generate two freely available test collections. One collection…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
In author name disambiguation, author forenames are used to decide which name instances are disambiguated together and how much they are likely to refer to the same author. Despite such a crucial role of forenames, their effect on the performances of heuristic (string matching) and algorithmic disambiguation is not well understood. This study assesses the contributions of forenames in author name disambiguation using multiple labeled datasets under varying ratios and lengths of full forenames, reflecting real-world scenarios in which an author is represented by forename variants (synonym) and …
How can we evaluate the performance of a disambiguation method implemented on big bibliographic data? This study suggests that the open researcher profile system, ORCID, can be used as an authority source to label name instances at scale. This study demonstrates the potential by evaluating the disambiguation performances of Author-ity2009 (which algorithmically disambiguates author names in MEDLINE) using 3 million name instances that are automatically labeled through linkage to 5 million ORCID researcher profiles. Results show that although ORCID-linked labeled data do not effectively represe…
Entity resolution is a challenging and hot research area in the field of Information Systems since last decade. Author Name Disambiguation (AND) in Bibliographic Databases (BD) like DBLP , Citeseer , and Scopus is a specialized field of entity resolution. Given many citations of underlying authors, the AND task is to find which citations belong to the same author. In this survey, we start with three basic AND problems, followed by need for solution and challenges. A generic, five-step framework is provided for handling AND issues. These steps are; (1) Preparation of dataset (2) Selection of pu…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Syracuse University（雪城大学）
In supervised machine learning for author name disambiguation, negative training data are often dominantly larger than positive training data. This paper examines how the ratios of negative to positive training data can affect the performance of machine learning algorithms to disambiguate author names in bibliographic records. On multiple labeled datasets, three classifiers - Logistic Regression, Naïve Bayes, and Random Forest - are trained through representative features such as coauthor names, and title words extracted from the same training data but with various positive-negative training d…
Several studies have found that collaboration networks are scale-free, proposing that such networks can be modeled by specific network evolution mechanisms like preferential attachment. This study argues that collaboration networks can look more or less scale-free depending on the methods for resolving author name ambiguity in bibliographic data. Analyzing networks constructed from multiple datasets containing 3.4M ~ 9.6M publication records, this study shows that collaboration networks in which author names are disambiguated by the commonly used heuristic, i.e., forename-initial-based name ma…
Everyday place descriptions often contain place names of fine-grained features, such as buildings or businesses, that are more difficult to disambiguate than names referring to larger places, for example cities or natural geographic features. Fine-grained places are often significantly more frequent and more similar to each other, and disambiguation heuristics developed for larger places, such as those based on population or containment relationships, are often not applicable in these cases. In this research, we address the disambiguation of fine-grained place names from everyday place descrip…
Author name disambiguation results are often evaluated by measures such as Cluster-F, K-metric, Pairwise-F, Splitting & Lumping Error, and B-cubed. Although these measures have distinctive evaluation schemes, this paper shows that they can be calculated in a single framework by a set of common steps that compare truth and predicted clusters through two hash tables recording information about name instances with their predicted cluster indices and frequencies of those indices per truth cluster. This integrative calculation reduces greatly calculation runtime, which is scalable to a clustering t…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
To train algorithms for supervised author name disambiguation, many studies have relied on hand-labeled truth data that are very laborious to generate. This paper shows that labeled training data can be automatically generated using information features such as email address, coauthor names, and cited references that are available from publication records. For this purpose, high-precision rules for matching name instances on each feature are decided using an external-authority database. Then, selected name instances in target ambiguous data go through the process of pairwise matching based on …
Author disambiguation arises when different authors share the same name, which is a critical task in digital libraries, such as DBLP, CiteULike, CiteSeerX, etc. While the state-of-the-art methods have developed various paper embedding-based methods performing in a top-down manner, they primarily focus on the ego-network of a target name and overlook the low-quality collaborative relations existed in the ego-network. Thus, these methods can be suboptimal for disambiguating authors. In this paper, we model the author disambiguation as a collaboration network reconstruction problem, and propose a…
GESIS - Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences（GESIS——莱布尼茨社会科学研究所）
This work addresses the problem of author name homonymy in the Web of Science. Aiming for an efficient, simple and straightforward solution, we introduce a novel probabilistic similarity measure for author name disambiguation based on feature overlap. Using the researcher-ID available for a subset of the Web of Science, we evaluate the application of this measure in the context of agglomeratively clustering author mentions. We focus on a concise evaluation that shows clearly for which problem setups and at which time during the clustering process our approach works best. In contrast to most ot…
In this work, we introduce a novel method for entity resolution author disambiguation in bibliographic networks. Such a method is based on a 2-steps network traversal using topological similarity measures for rating candidate nodes. Topological similarity is widely used in the Link Prediction application domain to assess the likelihood of an unknown link. A similarity function can be a good approximation for equality, therefore can be used to disambiguate, basing on the hypothesis that authors with many common co-authors are similar. Our method has experimented on a graph-based representation …
