Name Disambiguation in Digital Libraries

1
Name Disambiguation in Digital Libraries

• Tan Yee Fan
• 2005 October 19
• WING Group Meeting

2
Digital libraries

• DBLP, Citeseer, etc.
• Information is stored as metadata records to
  facilitate searching
• Author names
• Titles
• Publication titles
• Inconsistency in metadata records hinders
  searching
• Abbreviation of names and publication titles
• Typographical errors

3
Are they the same author?

• Danny Poo
• Danny C. C. Poo, Teck-Kang Toh, Christopher S. G.
  Khoo, Glenn Hong. Development of an Intelligent
  Web Interface to Online Library Catalog
  Databases. APSEC 1999 64-7
• Danny Chiang Choon Poo, Isaac K. C. Tan. Design
  of an Automatic Annotation Framework for
  Corporate Web Content. APSEC 2004 384-391
• Hui Yang
• Maan A. Kousa, Ahmed K. Elhakeem, Hui Yang.
  Performance of ATM networks under hybrid ARQ/FEC
  error control scheme. IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw. 7(6)
  917-925 (1999)
• Hui Yang, Tat-Seng Chua. QUALIFIER Question
  Answering by Lexical Fabric and External
  Resources. EACL 2003 363-370

4
Who am I, I am who?

• Author name disambiguation
• Given a large number of citations, how to
  determine which name is which author?
• Closely related problem citation matching
• Given a large number of citations, how to
  determine which citations refer to the same
  papers?
• Solutions must be scalable
• DBLP has more than 660,000 citations
• Citeseer has more than 730,000 documents

5
Ideas

• Idea 1 determine the research field
• Unfortunately, paper titles have limited words
  and some conferences tend to be broad
• Idea 2 use coauthors information
• Likely that an author will collaborate with a
  selected group of people
• This group will likely publish a number of papers
  together
• To find the similarity of coauthor lists

6
Forward directionM. Kan M.-Y. Kan Min-Yen
Kan

• Problem
• Pairwise comparison on all the coauthor lists is
  very expensive (few days also cannot finish)
• Solution
• Soft clustering on the coauthor lists using some
  cheap distance measure
• Then perform pairwise comparison within the
  clusters
• What is a good soft clustering algorithm?

7
Backward directionThis Hang Cui is not that
Hang Cui

• Difficult to determine using the metadata alone
  without external resources
• Many authors have several distinct research areas
• Each research area with different collaborators
• Currently investigating what kind of external
  resource to use
• Goooooooooogle for URLs?

8
The end

• But the research has just begun