The services provided by digital libraries can be much improved by correctly identifying variants of the same name. For example, this will allow for better retrieval of all the works by a certain author. We focus on variants caused by abbreviations of first names, and show that significant achievements are possible by simple lexical analysis and comparison of names. This is done in two steps: first a pairwise matching of names is performed, and then these are used to find cliques of equivalent names. However, these steps can each be performed in a variety of ways. We therefore conduct an experimental analysis using two real datasets to find which approaches actually work well in practice. Interestingly, this depends on the size of the repository, as larger repositories may have many more similar names.Feitelson's solution is to construct a graph of similarity between first names, then find weighted cliques grouping equivalent names. For example, given the first names "Ace D. E.", "A. D.", "Abe F. G.", "Abe Bob C.", "A. B. C.", and "Abe B", we create the graph below where the edges are weighted by similarity between the names:
In this example, the names "Abe Bob C", "A B C", and "Abe B" are equivalent, as are "Ace D E" and "A D", leaving "Abe F G" by itself.
I've implemented Feitelson's weighted clique algorithm in a PHP script that calls a C++ program that does the clique analysis. Results can be returned in HTML or JSON. You can try the service at http://bioguid.info/services/. You can also call the service directly by a HTTP POST request to the URL http://bioguid.info/services/equivalent.php with these parameters:
| Parameter | Value | Description |
|---|---|---|
| names | string | List of first names, separated by end of line (\n) character |
| format | html or json | Format of the results |
6 comments:
Very nice! Not to spoil the achievement, but isn't the real problem the false positives? For example, there's a clinician with the same last name and first initial as mine who publishes about 10x more than I do :) For a given citation (almost all of which only have first initial and last name), how do you tell which of the two it is? The Feitelson algorithm clusters this into 3 authors, which is wrong in two ways.
I suspect that the extent to which false positives are a problem depends on scope. Within PubMed it will be bigger problem than within, say, just the phylogenetic literature. It might be nice to have service that could quantify the likelihood that the same name referred to different people (perhaps based on patterns of coauthorship, dates, and journals).
You could also take a look at how they solved this problem in the music database, last.fm.
They had to solve it both for artist names and for track names.
I'm getting back good results with JSON, but not with HTML.
curl -X POST -d "names=Mark%0AM." -d "format=json" 'http://bioguid.info/services/equivalent.php'
works fine, but
curl -X POST -d "names=Mark%ark%0AM." -d "format=html" 'http://bioguid.info/services/equivalent.php'
returns
well, I don't know how to post HTML on Blogger.
Thanks for spotting this, something weird was going on with PHP's handling of the output from the clustering program. Fixed now.
Works great now!
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