Pairwise learning for name disambiguation in large-scale heterogeneous academic networks

Name disambiguation aims to identify unique authors with the same name. Existing name disambiguation methods always exploit author attributes to enhance disambiguation results. However, some discriminative author attributes (e.g., email and affiliation) may change because of graduation or job-hopping, which will result in the separation of the same author's papers in digital libraries. Although these attributes may change, an author's co-authors and research topics do not change frequently with time, which means that papers within a period have similar text and relation information in the academic network. Inspired by this idea, we introduce Multi-view Attention-based Pairwise Recurrent Neural Network (MA-PairRNN) to solve the name disambiguation problem. We divided papers into small blocks based on discriminative author attributes and blocks of the same author will be merged according to pairwise classification results of MA-PairRNN. MA-PairRNN combines heterogeneous graph embedding learning and pairwise similarity learning into a framework. In addition to attribute and structure information, MA-PairRNN also exploits semantic information by meta-path and generates node representation in an inductive way, which is scalable to large graphs. Furthermore, a semantic-level attention mechanism is adopted to fuse multiple meta-path based representations. A Pseudo-Siamese network consisting of two RNNs takes two paper sequences in publication time order as input and outputs their similarity. Results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our framework has a significant and consistent improvement of performance on the name disambiguation task. It was also demonstrated that MA-PairRNN can perform well with a small amount of training data and have better generalization ability across different research areas.