A graph-based author name disambiguation method and analysis via information theory

Abstract

Name ambiguity, due to the fact that many people share an identical name, often deteriorates the performance of information integration, document retrieval and web search. In academic data analysis, author name ambiguity usually decreases the analysis performance. To solve this problem, an author name disambiguation task is designed to divide documents related to an author name reference into several parts and each part is associated with a real-life person. Existing methods usually use either attributes of documents or relationships between documents and co-authors. However, methods of feature extraction using attributes cause inflexibility of models while solutions based on relationship graph network ignore the information contained in the features. In this paper, we propose a novel name disambiguation model based on representation learning which incorporates attributes and relationships. Experiments on a public real dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our model and experimental results demonstrate that our solution is superior to several state-of-the-art graph-based methods. We also increase the interpretability of our method through information theory and show that the analysis could be helpful for model selection and training progress.