Author disambiguation by hierarchical agglomerative clustering with adaptive stopping criterion

Entity disambiguation is an important step in many information retrieval applications. This paper proposes new research for entity disambiguation with the focus of name disambiguation in digital libraries. In particular, pairwise similarity is first learned for publications that share the same author name string (ANS) and then a novel Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering approach with Adaptive Stopping Criterion (HACASC) is proposed to adaptively cluster a set of publications that share a same ANS to individual clusters of publications with different author identities. The HACASC approach utilizes a mixture of kernel ridge regressions to intelligently determine the threshold in clustering. This obtains more appropriate clustering granularity than non-adaptive stopping criterion. We conduct a large scale empirical study with a dataset of more than 2 million publication record pairs to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed HACASC approach.