An Efficient Technique for Author Name Disambiguation
Rima Hazra, Anomitra Saha, Shubhra Baran Deb and Debasis Mitra
Department of Information Technology
National Institute of Technology, Durgapur, India
Email:frimahazra93, anomitra1993, shubhra.baran.deb, debasis.mitrag@gmail.com
Abstract—Scholarly digital libraries have become an important source
of bibliographic records for scientific communities. Author name search
is one of the most common query exercised in digital libraries. The name
ambiguity problem in the context of author search in digital libraries,
arising from multiple authors sharing the same name, poses many
challenges. A number of name disambiguation methods have been
proposed in the literature so far. A variety of bibliographic attributes
have been considered in these methods. However, hardly any effort has
been made to assess the potential contribution of these attributes. We, for
the first time, evaluate the potential strength and/or weaknesses of these
attributes by a rigorous course of experiments on a large data set. We
also explore the potential utility of some attributes from different
perspective. A close look reveals that most of the earlier work require
one or more attributes which are difficult to obtain in practical
applications. Based on this empirical study, we identify three very
common and easy to access attributes and propose a two-step hierarchical
clustering technique to solve name ambiguity using these attributes only.
Experimental results on data set extracted from a popular digital library
show that the proposed method achieves significantly high level of
accuracy (> 90%) for most of the instances.
I. INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, researchers mostly use scholarly digital libraries
(DLs), such as DBLP, Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search,
CiteSeer, PubMed to perform literature review of relevant works [1].
These DLs usually offer millions of citation records with each record
having bibliographic attributes such as title, authors’ names,
publication venue etc. However, many of them cannot correctly
index (distinguish) publica-tion records of various individuals
because of the so called name ambiguity problem. Such ambiguity
mainly arises when multiple authors share exactly the same name.
For example, there are more than 200 different individual authors
sharing the name “Wei Wang” [2]. Name ambiguity may also arise
when an author uses her short name in some publications and full
name in the other [3]. For example, an author named Mark Jones
uses M. Jones in his one publication and Mark Jones in another.
Author name search is a very popular query used in digital library
databases [4]. Ambiguous names often lead to confusion and
mistakes in identifying citation records of authors’ articles. A DL
user, while searching for publications of a particular author, often
receives a combination of articles written by different authors sharing
the same name. The problem can be solved by devising automatic
methods to disambiguate all the present citation records of a DL.
A number of name diambiguation methods have been pro-posed in
the literature so far [5], [6], [7]. Existing solutions are
978-1-5090-1936-6/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE
based on either supervised approach or unsupervised approach. Most
of the supervised solutions exploit learning function to train the
model and generic machine learning algorithms to solve the problem.
However, with tremendous growth in the size of the DL databases,
cost of obtaining training data becomes prohibitively large; thereby
making supervised approaches impractical. In unsupervised
approach, name dis-ambiguation is usually considered as a clustering
issue [8] such that all the articles authored by a unique individual is
placed in a group (cluster). Among these methods, ones using
multiple level of clustering (termed as hierarchical clustering) are
found to be most efficient for real data [8]. In general, these methods
compare bibliographic attributes (e.g. author’s names, title,
publication venue, author’s institutional affiliations and email) of
ambiguous authors and use some similarity func-tions to determine
the clusters [1]. Although, these methods achieves convincing results
for many real life datasets, many of them suffer from a serious
drawback: requirements of extra attributes, such as author’s
institutional affiliation, address, article abstract etc. [9], which are
difficult to obtain in practical applications [1].
In this work, we perform empirical study to evaluate the potential
strength and/or weaknesses of the bibliographic at-tributes considered
earlier by revisiting their potential utility from various perspectives. We
also explore if some attributes, not considered yet, might be worth
considering. Finally, we select three very common and easily accessible
attributes and propose a two-step hierarchical clustering technique that
uses only these three attributes to solve the name ambiguity problem. In
the first step, articles are grouped into fragments by utilizing the co-
author relationship. If two articles authored by an ambiguous name have
the same co-author, they are grouped in the same fragment. The strength
of this step is evident from the fact that there is very little chance that two
different authors with the same name have the same co-author [7], [8]. In
the second step, the fragments thus formed are further refined by
considering the correlation between the articles with respect to article
title and year of publication. The explanation behind choosing these three
attributes is presented in Section II. In order to evaluate the strength of
the proposed technique, we have performed experiments with several
instances of ambiguous names extracted from DBLP database.
Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves
significantly high accuracy for most of the instances.
The remainder of this paper is organised as follows. Section II
presents a summary of prior work in the related area and
motivation behind the current work. A formal presentation of the
problem appears in Section III. Section IV describes the proposed
technique. Experimental results are summarized in Section V.
Finally, conclusions are drawn in Section VI.
II. PRIOR WORK AND MOTIVATION
A number of name disambiguation methods have been proposed
in the literature in the last few decades. Existing work on this topic
can broadly be discriminated by the types of methods and the types
of features (attributes) used. The techniques using supervised
methods exploit learning function to train the model and generic
machine learning algorithms to solve the problem [8], [10]. An
associative technique proposed by Veloso et al. [5] is shown to
reduce the amount of training data significantly. Yin et al. [11]
develop a method called DISTINCT for author distinction, which
takes a set of distinguishable articles as training data automatically.
Torvik et al. [12] proposed a technique to disambiguate author names
for the articles in MEDLINE. The technique is shown to be
applicable for other bibliographic databases too.
To get rid of increasing cost involved in obtaining training data
with the tremendous growth in the size of the DL databases, a
number of techniques based on unsupervised learning have been
proposed. In unsupervised approach, name disambiguation is usually
considered as a clustering issue [8], [13], [14]. A technique using a
variant of famous K-means clustering algorithm was presented by
Han et al. [15]. A hierarchical naive bayes mixture model was used
in [6] to further improve the accuracy. A technique based on an
extension of Latent Dirichlet Allocation model [16] coupled with a
probabilistic model was proposed by Bhattacharya and Getoor [17].
Huang et al. [4] presented a blocking method to get candidate classes
of authors and DBSCAN clustering [18] to group articles by author.
Tang et al. [19] tried to formalize the problem in a unified
framework. Hidden Markov Random Fields are used to model
relation between two articles and Bayesian Information Criterion
(BIC) is used to estimate author number for each disambiguation
step. A few clustering techniques [7], [8], utilizing the concepts of
graph theory, have also been presented in recent past. A technique
using relationship network among authors (author social network)
was proposed in [20].
Existing techniques for author name disambiguation con-sider a
variety of bibliographic attributes such as author’s names, co-
authors’ names, article title, publication venue, au-thor’s institutional
affiliations, author’s research area, author’s email etc. To the best of
our knowledge, no effort has been made to judge the potential
contribution of the above attributes in solving the name ambiguity
problem. This motivates us to conduct rigorous experiments with a
large set of real data already disambiguated (either manually, or by
some existing methods) to identify the potential strength and/or
weaknesses of the various attributes, mentioned above, with respect
to name disambiguation. We also put efforts to identify some other
attributes (if any) which has not been considered yet but might have
the potential to contribute significantly.
As evident from many prior works [7], [11], our experiments also
found the co-author relationship to be the most dominant contributor
among all the attributes considered so far. How-ever, the sole use of
co-author relationship can hardly achieve desirable accuracy for most
of the cases. Our experiments also reveal that all other attributes
considered so far suffer from at least one of the following
shortcomings: (i) inability to contribute significantly for variety of
data sets [21], (ii) difficulty in obtaining the required information
(e.g., author’s curriculum vitae [9], institutional affiliation [19]
hardly ap-pears in any citation record, thereby requires reference to
external sources). We further notice that the domain (area) of
research for two different authors sharing an ambiguous name rarely
matches. Hence, research domain may be an useful attribute to
distinguish authors having ambiguous name. Although, it is almost
impossible to obtain research area directly from citation records, it
can be indirectly extracted from the article titles which are quite easy
to obtain. Usually, most of the researchers work in a specific domain
and publish articles in their respective domain. The research domain
of an author is often reflected in the keywords used in the titles of the
articles written by her.
We further observe a very interesting point related to the year of
publication, which none of the earlier work did. A careful scrutiny on
the histogram of number of articles pub-lished by various authors
having ambiguous names (already disambiguated by any means) in
different years, we find that in many cases, activity span of two
different individuals having same name usually do not coincide in
time. Activity span of an author is defined by the interval (start year,
end year) during which she publishes. For example, as shown in Fig.
1, among four individual authors sharing the name “Sourav
1
Chakraborty” , activity span of three (namely, Sourav Chakraborty
002, Sourav Chakraborty 003, Sourav Chakraborty 004) do not
overlap. Similar observations hold for many other ambiguous names
such as He Sun, Tao Xie.
Fig. 1. Histogram showing the activity span of various authors with an
ambiguous name
In a nutshell, above observations motivate us to consider the following
attributes of citation records in our proposed name
1
http://dblp.uni-trier.de/pers/hd/c/Chakraborty:Sourav
disambiguation technique: (i) co-author relationship, (ii) and/or efficiency of such techniques strongly depend on the
article title, (iii) year of publication. The manner in which bibliographic attributes considered at various levels of clus-tering. In
these attributes are used to disambiguate the authors is this section, we present our proposed hierarchical clustering
described in Section IV. technique that uses only three easily accessible and effective
III. PROBLEM FORMULATION attributes (as outlined in Section II) namely, co-author relationship,
As mentioned in Section I, a digital library user, while searching article title and publication year. It may be noted that given an author
for publications of a particular individual, often receives a combined name A, the collection of bibliographic records extracted from a DL,
set of articles written by different in-dividuals sharing the same corresponding to all the articles where A appears as one of the author
name. The objective of name disambiguation method is to partition works as the input to the proposed name disambiguation method. The
the set into a number of subsets where each set contains (all and method consists of two steps of clustering. Initially, we assume that
ideally only all) the articles written by an individual author.
each single article forms a cluster (i.e., for each and every article,
Formally, the problem of name disambiguation may be formulated as
there is an unique individual author named A). In the first step, initial
follows: Let CA = fc1; c2; ; ckg be a set of citation records such that
single-article clusters are grouped into fragments by utilizing the co-
one of the author of each citation record ci has name A. The author relationship. In the second step, the fragments thus formed are
objective of author name disambiguation is to identify a set RA = fr1; further refined by merging some of them based on article title and
r2; ; rmg of real individuals and partition the year of publication. The overview of the proposed technique is
set CA into subsets fCr1 g; fCr2 g; fCrm g, where each ri represents a depicted in Fig. 2. The details of various steps are described in
reference to a real individual having name A and subsequent subsections.
m denotes the total number of such individuals.
The problem of name disambiguation can be better illus-trated
using an example presented in Table I. There are total six articles
where each of them has an author named Debasis Mitra (A).
Apparently, it seems that all these six articles are authored by a
single individual (Debasis Mitra). However, a careful scrutiny can
reveal the fact that the set actually belongs to three distinct
individuals (marked with different colors) all sharing the name
Debasis Mitra. The articles c1; c3, and c5 belong to Debasis Mitra
(r1) who is a professor at the Florida Institute of Technology, Florida,
USA. The articles c2; c4 belong to Debasis Mitra (r2) who is an
Assistant Professor at National Institute of Technology, Durgapur,
India, and the article c6 belongs to Debasis Mitra (r3) who worked at
Bell labs, NJ, USA. A proper name disambiguation technique should
partition the set of records fc1; c2; c3; c4; c5; c6g (Table I) into three
subsets viz. fc1; c3; c5g, fc2; c4g, and fc6g.
Articles Fig. 2. Flowchart of the proposed name disambiguation technique
c1 : Optimization and Design of Network Routing Using Refined Asymptotic
Approximations. A. Clustering based on co-author relationship
Authors: Debasis Mitra (A), John A. Morrison (a1), K. G. Ramakrishnan (a2)
c2 : Certificate-based encoding of gate level description for secure transmission. Authors:
As mentioned in Section II, co-author relationship plays a major
Sandip Ghosal (a3), Debasis Mitra (A), role in name disambiguation. Given the set CA = fc1; c2; ; ckg of
Subhasis Bhattacharjee (a4) single-article clusters, we first extract the list of authors for each
c3 : Asymptotic Expansions of Moments of the Waiting Time in a Shared-Processor of an cluster. The co-author relationship between various clusters is then
Interactive System.
Authors: Debasis Mitra (A), John A. Morrison (a1)
represented as an undirected graph as follows: Each individual
c4 : Secure transmission of gate level description. Authors: cluster ci represents a node and there is an undirected edge between
Sandip Ghosal (a3), Debasis Mitra (A)
two nodes ci and cj if article ci and article cj has at least one common
c5 : The structure and management of service level agreements in networks. Authors:
Eric Bouillet (a5), Debasis Mitra (A), K. G. Ramakrishnan (a2) co-author except A. Two articles (ci; cj) are said to be directly
c6 : Reconstruction of 4-D Dynamic SPECT Images from Inconsistent Projection using a correlated with respect to co-author relationship if they share a
Spline Initialized FADs Algorithm (SIFADS) common co-author am (except A). Similarly, two articles (ci; cj) are
Authors: Mohmoud Abdalah (a6), Rostyslav Boutchko (a7), Debasis Mitra (A), Grant
T. Gullberg (a8) said to be transitively correlated with respect to co-author
Table I relationship if ci shares a common co-author ap (except A) with
A FEW CITATION RECORDS OF AMBIGUOUS AUTHORS another article ck, which in turn shares another co-author aq (except
IV. PROPOSED WORK A) with the article cj and so on. In other words, two articles (ci; cj)
As apparent from earlier research on related area [8], [14], are correlated (either directly or transitively) with respect to co-
[22], hierarchical clustering techniques are found to be effective author relationship if there exist a path from ci to cj in the underlying
graph. It may be noted that in reality,
to solve name disambiguation. The applicability
there is very little chance that two articles authored by two different
individuals having the same name would be directly or transitively
correlated with respect to co-author relationship. Hence, all the
articles forming a connected component [23] in the underlying graph
may be considered to be authored by the same individual with name
A. We use breadth first traversal [24] on the graph to find the
connected components and use that information to merge the single-
article clusters into a set of fragments fF1g; fF2g; ; fFng, where n k.
After this step, it is assumed that all the records belonging to a
fragment Fi is authored by a unique individual (AFi ) with name A.
The set of fragments thus obtained are fed as input to the second step
described in the next subsection.
As an illustrative example, let us consider the set of citation
records of Table I. The co-author informations as extracted from the
set CA are summarized in a 2-D matrix M (Table
II). The rows of the matrix represent articles c1; c2; ; c6
and columns represent authors a1; a2; ; a8 (except A).
M[i][j] = 1 indicates that the article ci has an author named
aj. Similarly, M[i][j] = 0 indicates that the article ci does not
as title sim) from two different fragments is sufficiently high (T
SHIGH ), the two fragments are merged without consid-ering the
publication year further. If title sim is found to be moderate (T
SMOD), then the two fragments are merged if the similarity in the
activity spans of the two authors corresponding to two fragments
(expressed as actspan sim) is found to be true (AST RUE). Note
that the activity span of the author corresponding to a fragment
could be found by considering the publication year of the articles
of that fragment. Two fragments are not considered for merging
at all if title sim is found to be low (T SLOW ). The overall
procedure for possible merging of fragments is depicted in
Algorithm 1. The detail methods of computing title sim and
actspan sim is described next.
Input : Intermediate fragments:fF1; F2:::; Fng
Output: Set of clusters: Cr1; Cr2; ::; Crm
for Fi in CA do
for Fj in CA do
if title sim = T SHIGH then merge Fi;
Fj

have an author named aj. Note that the required graph can be else if title sim = T SMOD and actspan sim = AST RUE then merge Fi; Fj
constructed easily by referring the matrix M. The graph for
this example is shown in Fig. 3. A breadth first traversal on end

the graph yields three connected components fF1; F2; F3g end
end
where F1 = fc1; c3; c5g, F2 = fc2; c4g, and F3 = fc6g. The
existence of the connected components may also be verified Algorithm 1: Merging fragments in 2nd level of clustering
from Fig. 3.
1) Computation of title sim: As mentioned in Section II, it is
a1 a2 a3 a4 a5 a6 a7 a8
unlikely that two authors sharing ambiguous name work in the same
c1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
c2 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 research domain and hence, research domain may be a crucial factor
c3
c4
1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 to be considered in name disam-biguation. The articles written by an
0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0
c5 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 author often contain keywords relevant to their domain of research.
c
6 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 Accordingly, computation of similarity between the article titles of
Table II various fragments based on the keyword matching may be useful.
CO-AUTHOR MATRIX (M) FOR SET CITATION RECORDS CA OF TABLE I
The procedure for keyword matching involves a preprocessing step
to eliminate stop words. Stop words typically refer to some common
c1 : A c5 : A words or phrases used to construct sentences in any language. For
a2 example, in English language, prepositions, articles, verbs,
a5 conjunctions may be considered as stop words. However, sometimes,
a word considered as keyword for some applications may be
a1 considered as stop word for another application. Table III shows the
c4 : A
a4 a3 stop words and the keywords for article title corresponding to the
record c3 of Table I.
c2 : A
a6,a7,a8 Title string Asymptotic Expansions of Moments of the Waiting Time in a Shared-Processor
of an Interactive System.
c3 : A c6 : A Stop words of, the, in, a
Keywords Asymptotic, Expansion, Moments, Waiting, Time, Shared, Processor, Interactive,
System.
Fig. 3. Graph representation of co-author relationship for the citation records Table III
of Table I LIST OF STOP WORDS AND KEYWORDS FOR AN EXAMPLE TITLE STRING

B. Clustering based on article title and year of publication
In this step, the set of fragments obtained above are further refined
by applying one more level of clustering. The two fragments are
merged into a single cluster if they satisfy a similarity criterion
specially designed based on the correlation between the articles with
respect to article title and year of publication. If the similarity in titles
of two articles (expressed
Once the stop words are eliminated, the amount of keyword
matching (similarity) between each pair of articles (ci; cj), where ci 2
Fi and cj 2 Fj, is obtained by computing Rat-cliff/Obershelp pattern
matching algorithm [25]. The algorithm uses the idea of gestalt
(which describes how a person can identify pattern as a whole, not
merely as collections of parts) to determine the similarity between
the pair of strings. It
explores two sorted (in alphabetical order) strings ti and tj to locate
the longest common subsequence (LCS) of characters. The LCS is
considered as an anchor. Similar procedure is applied recursively
with the remaining characters (if any) on the left and on the right of
the anchor until one of the string get exhausted. The similarity score
(sim score) is expressed as percentage match between the pair of
strings and computed as twice the total number of characters
common (summation of characters in LCS at each step) between the
two strings divided by the total number of characters in the two
strings.
Based on a detailed empirical study on the publications of a large
number of individuals, we have following observations: Usually,
there is at least a pair of articles authored by a typical author, where
the corresponding article titles include a significant number of
common keywords (related to her research domain). However,
sometimes, there may be case that there is no pair having a large
number of common keywords but there are two or more pairs sharing
fewer number of common keywords within their title string. Keeping
this in mind, we assign values to title sim by considering three
fragment Fi is identified by AFi (Section IV-A). In order to measure
actspan sim between the author AFi and AFj , we introduce two
parameters, namely, actspan overlap and actspan distance. The
actspan overlap(AFi ; AFj ) for two authors AFi and AFj is computed
as the overlap (in number of years), if any, between actspan(AFi )
and actspan(AFj ). The actspan distance(AFi ; AFj ) for two authors
AFi and AFj is computed as the difference (in number of years),
between actpeak(AFi ) and actpeak(AFj ). Finally, actspan sim cor-
responding to AFi and AFj is assigned the value AST RUE,
if actspan overlap(AFi ; AFj ) is found to be greater than
T hoverlap and actspan distance(AFi ; AFj ) is less than
T hdistance, where T hoverlap, T hdistance are two predefined
thresholds chosen empirically. The procedure of computing
actspan sim(Fi; Fj) is outlined in Algorithm 3.
Input : actspan overlap(AFi ; AFj ), actspan distance(AFi ; AFj )
Output: actspan sim(AFi ; AFj )
if actspan overlap(AFi ; AFj ) > T hoverlap then

different scenarios (Algorithm 2). If there exists at least one pair of if actspan distance(AFi ; AFj ) < T hdistance then
) AS
actspan sim(AF ; AF T RUE
j
articles (ci; cj) (where ci 2 Fi and cj 2 Fj), such that the corresponding i

end
similarity score (sim score(ci; cj)) is significantly high (let say 85%), else
AS
actspan sim(AF ; AF j )
title sim is assigned the value T SHIGH . The value T SMOD is i
F ALSE

assigned to title sim if there exists no pair having such high similarity end

score but there exist at least two pairs of articles (ci; cj) and (ci0 ; cj0 ) Algorithm 3: Computation of actspan sim
(where ci; ci0 2 Fi and cj; cj0 2 Fj), such that both similarity scores are V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
moderately high (let say 65%). The value T SLOW is assigned to title In order to evaluate our proposed scheme, we have per-formed
sim otherwise. experiments on a large set of bibliographic data extracted form
DBLP. Note that DBLP have already disam-biguated a few
Input : ffFig; fFjgg ambiguous names by some means. We extract citation records of
Output: title sim(Fi; Fj) thirteen such already disambiguated names. A summary of data set is
title sim(Fi; Fj) None; shown in the first three columns of Table IV. The dataset contains
for T itlei in Fi do
samples with a large variety in terms of number of true authors and
ti remove stopwords(T itlei);
number of articles. A copy of the disambiguated data is kept as the
golden data set [26] (to be used as a reference for evaluating the
for T itlej in Fj do
accuracy). The golden data corresponding to a typical name A is
tj remove stopwords(T itlej);

sim score Title Similar(ti, tj);

represented as a set CGA = ffGr1 g; fGr2 g; ; fGrp gg, where r1; r2; ;
if sim score T SHIGH then counthigh + + ; rp represent the true authors and each fGri g represents the set of
else if sim score T SMOD then countmod + + ;
articles authored by ri. For each name, set of articles corresponding
else if sim score T SLOW then countlow + + ; to all the disambiguated authors are merged to construct the input for
end the proposed technique. In other words, the input data corresponding
end to A is represented
TS
if counthigh 1 then title sim(Fi; Fj) HIGH ;
as CIA = ffGr1 g [ fGr2 g [ fGrp gg. The final result obtained by
else if countmod 2 then title sim(Fi; Fj)T SMOD ;
executing the proposed name disambiguation on
else title sim(Fi; Fj) T SLOW ;
the input data thus constructed for A may be expressed as
Algorithm 2: Computation of title sim
CPA = ffCr1 g; fCr2 g; ; fCrm gg, where r1; r2; ; rm represent the
2) Computation of actspan sim: Activity span of an author ai,
disambiguated authors and each fCri g represents
denoted by actspan(ai), is expressed as the in-terval (start year, the set of articles authored by ri.
end year) during which ai publishes. The activity peak The level of accuracy achieved by the proposed scheme is
corresponding to an author ai, denoted by actpeak(ai), is defined measured by comparing CPA with CGA for each and every name (A)
as the year in which ai publishes using the standard evaluation metrics such as pairwise precision,
maximum number of articles (let say denoted by pmaxai). pairwise recall and pairwise F1 scores. It may be noted that these
ai
In case, a publishes p number of articles in multiple metrics have also been used in many earlier work [8], [11], [19]. The
i max

years, the median is considered as actpeak(ai). Recall that the pairwise measures mentioned
individual author (having name A) associated with a
 evident from the high level of accuracy achieved for data set
extracted from DBLP.
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He Sun 5 46 100 80.63 89.27
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Sourav Chakraborty 5 54 100 40 57.22 [20] F. H. Levin and C. A. Heuser, “Evaluating the use of social networks in
Arnab Roy 6 56 100 84.91 91.84 ame disambiguation in digital libraries,” Journal of Information and
Tao Xie 6 321 97.34 64.82 77.82 Data Management, vol. 1, pp. 183–197, 2010.
Hui Fang 8 149 57.29 53 55.11
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Micheal Wagner 16 153 100 99.39 99.69 for name disambiguation in bibliographic citations,” Journal of the
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A two-step hierarchical clustering technique for name dis- Publishing Company, Incorporated, 2008.
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efficient. The level of accuracy is further improved by the use of year
of publication of articles. The strength of the proposed technique is