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 data ratios. Results show that increasing negative training data can improve disambiguation performance but with a few percent of performance gains and sometimes degrade it. Logistic Regression and Naïve Bayes learn optimal disambiguation models even with a base ratio (1:1) of positive and negative training data. Also, the performance improvement by Random Forest tends to quickly saturate roughly after 1:10 ~ 1:15. These findings imply that contrary to the common practice using all training data, name disambiguation algorithms can be trained using part of negative training data without degrading much disambiguation performance while increasing computational efficiency. This study calls for more attention from author name disambiguation scholars to methods for machine learning from imbalanced data.
Author name disambiguation in bibliographic databases is the problem of grouping together scientific publications written by the same person, accounting for potential homonyms and/or synonyms. Among solutions to this problem, digital libraries are increasingly offering tools for authors to manually curate their publications and claim those that are theirs. Indirectly, these tools allow for the inexpensive collection of large annotated training data, which can be further leveraged to build a complementary automated disambiguation system capable of inferring patterns for identifying publications…
Insight Centre for Data Analytics（洞察数据分析中心）；University College Dublin（都柏林大学学院）
Following a particular news story online is an important but difficult task, as the relevant information is often scattered across different domains/sources (e.g., news articles, blogs, comments, tweets), presented in various formats and language styles, and may overlap with thousands of other stories. In this work we join the areas of topic tracking and entity disambiguation, and propose a framework named Story Disambiguation - a cross-domain story tracking approach that builds on real-time entity disambiguation and a learning-to-rank framework to represent and update the rich semantic struct…
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…
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 …
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）；Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology（三星综合技术院）；AItrics
While semi-supervised learning (SSL) has proven to be a promising way for leveraging unlabeled data when labeled data is scarce, the existing SSL algorithms typically assume that training class distributions are balanced. However, these SSL algorithms trained under imbalanced class distributions can severely suffer when generalizing to a balanced testing criterion, since they utilize biased pseudo-labels of unlabeled data toward majority classes. To alleviate this issue, we formulate a convex optimization problem to softly refine the pseudo-labels generated from the biased model, and develop a…
University of Granada（格拉纳达大学）；Mälardalen University（梅拉达伦大学）
Differences in data size per class, also known as imbalanced data distribution, have become a common problem affecting data quality. Big Data scenarios pose a new challenge to traditional imbalanced classification algorithms, since they are not prepared to work with such amount of data. Split data strategies and lack of data in the minority class due to the use of MapReduce paradigm have posed new challenges for tackling the imbalance between classes in Big Data scenarios. Ensembles have shown to be able to successfully address imbalanced data problems. Smart Data refers to data of enough qual…
Sichuan University（四川大学）；Rutgers University – New Brunswick（罗格斯大学新不伦瑞克分校）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Tennessee State University（田纳西州立大学）
The dynamic ensemble selection of classifiers is an effective approach for processing label-imbalanced data classifications. However, such a technique is prone to overfitting, owing to the lack of regularization methods and the dependence of the aforementioned technique on local geometry. In this study, focusing on binary imbalanced data classification, a novel dynamic ensemble method, namely adaptive ensemble of classifiers with regularization (AER), is proposed, to overcome the stated limitations. The method solves the overfitting problem through implicit regularization. Specifically, it lev…
Name disambiguation and the subsequent name conflation are essential for the correct processing of person name queries in a digital library or other database. It distinguishes each unique person from all other records in the database. We study inventor name disambiguation for a patent database using methods and features from earlier work on author name disambiguation and propose a feature set appropriate for a patent database. A random forest was selected for the pairwise linking classifier since they outperform Naive Bayes, Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machines (SVM), Conditional Infer…
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 …
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…
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…
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 …
Purdue University（普渡大学）；Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis（印第安纳大学-普渡大学印第安纳波利斯分校）
In real-world, our DNA is unique but many people share names. This phenomenon often causes erroneous aggregation of documents of multiple persons who are namesake of one another. Such mistakes deteriorate the performance of document retrieval, web search, and more seriously, cause improper attribution of credit or blame in digital forensic. To resolve this issue, the name disambiguation task is designed which aims to partition the documents associated with a name reference such that each partition contains documents pertaining to a unique real-life person. Existing solutions to this task subst…
The name entity disambiguation task aims to partition the records of multiple real-life persons so that each partition contains records pertaining to a unique person. Most of the existing solutions for this task operate in a batch mode, where all records to be disambiguated are initially available to the algorithm. However, more realistic settings require that the name disambiguation task be performed in an online fashion, in addition to, being able to identify records of new ambiguous entities having no preexisting records. In this work, we propose a Bayesian non-exhaustive classification fra…
Named Entity Disambiaguation (NED) is a central task for applications dealing with natural language text. Assume that we have a graph based knowledge base (subsequently referred as Knowledge Graph) where nodes represent various real world entities such as people, location, organization and concepts. Given data sources such as social media streams and web pages Entity Linking is the task of mapping named entities that are extracted from the data to those present in the Knowledge Graph. This is an inherently difficult task due to several reasons. Almost all these data sources are generated witho…
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…
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…
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…
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…
An author name disambiguation (AND) algorithm identifies a unique author entity record from all similar or same publication records in scholarly or similar databases. Typically, a clustering method is used that requires calculation of similarities between each possible record pair. However, the total number of pairs grows quadratically with the size of the author database making such clustering difficult for millions of records. One remedy for this is a blocking function that reduces the number of pairwise similarity calculations. Here, we introduce a new way of learning blocking schemes by us…
In a social community, multiple persons may share the same name, phone number or some other identifying attributes. This, along with other phenomena, such as name abbreviation, name misspelling, and human error leads to erroneous aggregation of records of multiple persons under a single reference. Such mistakes affect the performance of document retrieval, web search, database integration, and more importantly, improper attribution of credit (or blame). The task of entity disambiguation partitions the records belonging to multiple persons with the objective that each decomposed partition is co…
We are presenting a method to recognise geographical references in free text. Our tool must work on various languages with a minimum of language-dependent resources, except a gazetteer. The main difficulty is to disambiguate these place names by distinguishing places from persons and by selecting the most likely place out of a list of homographic place names world-wide. The system uses a number of language-independent clues and heuristics to disambiguate place name homographs. The final aim is to index texts with the countries and cities they mention and to automatically visualise this informa…
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 …
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…
The study of science at the individual micro-level frequently requires the disambiguation of author names. The creation of author's publication oeuvres involves matching the list of unique author names to names used in publication databases. Despite recent progress in the development of unique author identifiers, e.g., ORCID, VIVO, or DAI, author disambiguation remains a key problem when it comes to large-scale bibliometric analysis using data from multiple databases. This study introduces and validates a new methodology called seed+expand for semi-automatic bibliographic data collection for a…
