A Multistage Hierarchical Method for Author Name

Disambiguation

Tasleem Arifa, Rashid Alib, M Asgerc

aDepartment of Information Technology, BGSB University Rajouri(Jammu and Kashmir)-185234 India, Contact: tasleem.ap@gmail.com

bDepartment of Computer Engineering, AMU Aligarh, India.

cSchool of Mathematical Sciences and Engineering, BGSB University Rajouri(Jammu and Kashmir), India.

Author name ambiguity has long been studied as a problem which affects literature management and leadsto incorrect attribution of publications and credit to authors. Majority of the solutions provided either sufferfrom split citation problem or mixed citation problem. In recent years, there seems to be a tendency to useand store additional attributes of a publication to enrich its metadata. Use of e-mail ID of correspondingauthors is prevalent in almost all publishing houses. In addition to the traditional metadata like author(s),title, venue and year, other attributes like e-mail ID and affiliation of author(s) are available in publicationheaders and in some cases in metadata also. For example, ACM Digital Library stores affiliations of authorsas part of their metadata. In this paper, we propose a method that creates clusters in stages with eachstage using a different attribute on the clusters created in the previous step. The purpose is to explore theeffect of these additional attributes in resolving the author name ambiguity problem. Experimental resultson publications obtained from DBLP show that our method obtained significant improvements over theexisting state-of-the-art methods with average precision, recall and F-score of 93.93, 91.57 and 92.33 percentrespectively and average execution time of 0.07 seconds per publication.

Keywords : Hierarchical Clustering, Metadata, Name Disambiguation.

1. INTRODUCTION

The advent of Internet has changed the way welive, communicate and maintain relationships.Research collaborations are not an exceptionand have benefited a lot from the advancesin Information and Communication Technol-ogy (ICT) [1] and web technologies have beenderiving developments at the research front [2].

The rise in number of publications producedwith each passing year has made it quite dif-ficult for literature management services toproperly index the publications of conflictingauthors. This can be attributed to the fact thatour parents had a limited number of optionsto choose our names from. In America alone114 million males share 300 common names [3]whereas in China the problem is more severe

as 1.1 billion of its population shares just 129surnames [4]. If we look at the name ambigu-ity from the types of subproblem being facedin indexing i.e., split citation and mixed cita-tion; split citation means that we have to man-age publications of non-existent authors [3] andmixed citations means that we are mixing twodifferent real authors into one author. Howeverthe increase in percentage of joint publicationscan be treated as a relief for solutions to thisproblem as information about more authors ispresent in a publication metadata which leadsto enrichment of publication metadata.

As pointed out by Liu [5], low availability ofsome key fields comprising of the metadata ofa citation-record have resulted in poor perfor-mance of author disambiguation mechanisms.As such the need for extra information is being

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International Journal of Information Processing, 9(3), 92-105, 2015ISSN : 0973-8215IK International Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, India

A Multistage Hierarchical Method for Author Name Disambiguation 103

very well. Experiments conducted and compar-isons with other name disambiguation methodsindicated substantial improvement over HACand CONSTRAINT and considerable improve-ment over Fixed-K. Although the performanceimprovement over Fixed-K is only 1.35 percent,it is significant in the sense that it may be-come much more difficult to increase the per-formance more in the upper bracket of morethan 90 percent prediction performance.

Publication venue title has been used forauthor name disambiguation purposes in pre-vious studies as well as in this study but weare of the view that with the ever increasingpublications it may not serve as a good featurefor name disambiguation purposes as more andmore similar authors may publish in same orrelatively similar venues. The low recall andF1 score in case of Gang Wu can be primar-ily attributed with more than one Gang Wupublishing in similar publication venues.

An important observation that we made dur-ing this study was that in majority of the casesone author in a group of similar authors havealmost more than forty percent of the publi-cations. Another observation that we madeduring this study was that more the numberof publications, the better the disambiguationresults.

As a part of future work we intend to excludethe venue information and include title infor-mation and examine the effects of the intendedchange. In addition to that we also intend to

make use of Soft-Computing techniques to dealwith split-citation problem so that the preci-sion may be increased further.

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Tasleem Arif obtained hisMCA from University of Jammuin 2004. He obtained his Ph.Din Computer Science from BabaGhulam Shah Badshah Univer-sity Rajouri in 2015. His Ph.Dwork was on Academic SocialNetwork Extraction from online

sources. He has authored about 25 papers in vari-ous International Journals and International con-ference proceedings. Currently he is working as Sr.Assistant Professor in the Post Graduate Depart-ment of Information Technology, Baba GhulamShah Badshah University Rajouri, Jammu andKashmir. His research interests include Web Min-ing, Soft Computing, Information Retrieval, DataMining and Cryptography and Network Security.

Rashid Ali obtained his BTechand MTech from AMU Ali-garh, India in 1999 and 2001respectively. He obtained hisPh.D in Computer Engineeringin February 2010 from AMUAligarh. His Ph.D work was onPerformance Evaluation of Web

Search Engines. He has authored about 75 papersin various International Journals and Internationalconference proceedings. He has presented papersin many International conferences and has alsochaired sessions in few International conferences.He has reviewed articles for some of the reputed In-ternational Journals and International conferenceproceedings. He has supervised 15 MTech dis-sertation. Currently, he is supervising four Ph.Dcandidates. His research interests include WebSearching, Web Mining, soft Computing (Rough-Set, Artificial Neural Networks, Fuzzy Logic etc.,)and Image Retrieval Techniques.

Mohammed Asger obtainedhis M.Sc and Ph.D from JamiaMillia Islamia, New Delhi. Hehas vast teaching and adminis-trative experience and has beeninstrumental in setting up of fewEngineering colleges in the NCR

region. He has authored about 50 papers in variousInternational Journals and International confer-ence proceedings. Currently he is working as DeanSchool of Mathematical Sciences and Engineering,Dean of Students and Principal University Col-lege of Engineering and Technology, Baba GhulamShah Badshah University Rajouri, Jammu andKashmir. His research interests include Soft Com-puting, Quantum Computing, etc., .