Author Name Disambiguation in Citations

Members of the academic community have increasingly turned to digital libraries to search for the latest work of their peers. On account of their role in the academic community, it is very important that these digital libraries collect citations in a consistent, accurate, and up-to-date manner, yet they do not correctly compile citations for myriads of authors for various reasons including authors with the same name, a problem known as the "name ambiguity problem." This problem occurs when multiple authors share the same name and particularly when names are simplified as in cases where names merely contain the first initial and the last name. In this paper, we propose an automatic algorithm to disambiguate authors in citations by using their specific attribute on the Web. A binary classifier and a cluster separator are applied to cluster citations. Our experiment results show that the disambiguation accuracy can be improved from 51% to 73% when using Web information.