No Arabic abstract
Name disambiguation is a key and also a very tough problem in many online systems such as social search and academic search. Despite considerable research, a critical issue that has not been systematically studied is disambiguation on the fly -- to complete the disambiguation in the real-time. This is very challenging, as the disambiguation algorithm must be accurate, efficient, and error tolerance. In this paper, we propose a novel framework -- CONNA -- to train a matching component and a decision component jointly via reinforcement learning. The matching component is responsible for finding the top matched candidate for the given paper, and the decision component is responsible for deciding on assigning the top matched person or creating a new person. The two components are intertwined and can be bootstrapped via jointly training. Empirically, we evaluate CONNA on two name disambiguation datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed framework can achieve a 1.21%-19.84% improvement on F1-score using joint training of the matching and the decision components. The proposed CONNA has been successfully deployed on AMiner -- a large online academic search system.
Author name ambiguity causes inadequacy and inconvenience in academic information retrieval, which raises the necessity of author name disambiguation (AND). Existing AND methods can be divided into two categories: the models focusing on content information to distinguish whether two papers are written by the same author, the models focusing on relation information to represent information as edges on the network and to quantify the similarity among papers. However, the former requires adequate labeled samples and informative negative samples, and are also ineffective in measuring the high-order connections among papers, while the latter needs complicated feature engineering or supervision to construct the network. We propose a novel generative adversarial framework to grow the two categories of models together: (i) the discriminative module distinguishes whether two papers are from the same author, and (ii) the generative module selects possibly homogeneous papers directly from the heterogeneous information network, which eliminates the complicated feature engineering. In such a way, the discriminative module guides the generative module to select homogeneous papers, and the generative module generates high-quality negative samples to train the discriminative module to make it aware of high-order connections among papers. Furthermore, a self-training strategy for the discriminative module and a random walk based generating algorithm are designed to make the training stable and efficient. Extensive experiments on two real-world AND benchmarks demonstrate that our model provides significant performance improvement over the state-of-the-art methods.
We present a manually-labeled Author Name Disambiguation(AND) Dataset called WhoisWho, which consists of 399,255 documents and 45,187 distinct authors with 421 ambiguous author names. To label such a great amount of AND data of high accuracy, we propose a novel annotation framework where the human and computer collaborate efficiently and precisely. Within the framework, we also propose an inductive disambiguation model to classify whether two documents belong to the same author. We evaluate the proposed method and other state-of-the-art disambiguation methods on WhoisWho. The experiment results show that: (1) Our model outperforms other disambiguation algorithms on this challenging benchmark. (2) The AND problem still remains largely unsolved and requires more in-depth research. We believe that such a large-scale benchmark would bring great value for the author name disambiguation task. We also conduct several experiments to prove our annotation framework could assist annotators to make accurate results efficiently and eliminate wrong label problems made by human annotators effectively.
Users on Twitter are commonly identified by their profile names. These names are used when directly addressing users on Twitter, are part of their profile page URLs, and can become a trademark for popular accounts, with people referring to celebrities by their real name and their profile name, interchangeably. Twitter, however, has chosen to not permanently link profile names to their corresponding user accounts. In fact, Twitter allows users to change their profile name, and afterwards makes the old profile names available for other users to take. In this paper, we provide a large-scale study of the phenomenon of profile name reuse on Twitter. We show that this phenomenon is not uncommon, investigate the dynamics of profile name reuse, and characterize the accounts that are involved in it. We find that many of these accounts adopt abandoned profile names for questionable purposes, such as spreading malicious content, and using the profile names popularity for search engine optimization. Finally, we show that this problem is not unique to Twitter (as other popular online social networks also release profile names) and argue that the risks involved with profile-name reuse outnumber the advantages provided by this feature.
We present a novel algorithm and validation method for disambiguating author names in very large bibliographic data sets and apply it to the full Web of Science (WoS) citation index. Our algorithm relies only upon the author and citation graphs available for the whole period covered by the WoS. A pair-wise publication similarity metric, which is based on common co-authors, self-citations, shared references and citations, is established to perform a two-step agglomerative clustering that first connects individual papers and then merges similar clusters. This parameterized model is optimized using an h-index based recall measure, favoring the correct assignment of well-cited publications, and a name-initials-based precision using WoS metadata and cross-referenced Google Scholar profiles. Despite the use of limited metadata, we reach a recall of 87% and a precision of 88% with a preference for researchers with high h-index values. 47 million articles of WoS can be disambiguated on a single machine in less than a day. We develop an h-index distribution model, confirming that the prediction is in excellent agreement with the empirical data, and yielding insight into the utility of the h-index in real academic ranking scenarios.
Author Name Disambiguation (AND) is the task of resolving which author mentions in a bibliographic database refer to the same real-world person, and is a critical ingredient of digital library applications such as search and citation analysis. While many AND algorithms have been proposed, comparing them is difficult because they often employ distinct features and are evaluated on different datasets. In response to this challenge, we present S2AND, a unified benchmark dataset for AND on scholarly papers, as well as an open-source reference model implementation. Our dataset harmonizes eight disparate AND datasets into a uniform format, with a single rich feature set drawn from the Semantic Scholar (S2) database. Our evaluation suite for S2AND reports performance split by facets like publication year and number of papers, allowing researchers to track both global performance and measures of fairness across facet values. Our experiments show that because previous datasets tend to cover idiosyncratic and biased slices of the literature, algorithms trained to perform well on one on them may generalize poorly to others. By contrast, we show how training on a union of datasets in S2AND results in more robust models that perform well even on datasets unseen in training. The resulting AND model also substantially improves over the production algorithm in S2, reducing error by over 50% in terms of $B^3$ F1. We release our unified dataset, model code, trained models, and evaluation suite to the research community. https://github.com/allenai/S2AND/