Identity uncertainty and citation matching

Authors: 
Pasula, H; Marthi, B; Milch, B; Russell, S; Shpitser, I
Author: 
Pasula, H
Marthi, B
Milch, B
Russell, S
Shpitser, I
Year: 
2003
Venue: 
Advances in Neural Information Processing (NIPS)
URL: 
http://people.csail.mit.edu/milch/papers/nipsnewer.pdf
Citations: 
267
Citations range: 
100 - 499
AttachmentSize
Pasula2003Identityuncertaintyand.pdf97.5 KB

Identity uncertainty is a pervasive problem in real-world data analysis. It
arises whenever objects are not labeled with unique identifiers or when
those identifiers may not be perceived perfectly. In such cases, two observations
may or may not correspond to the same object. In this paper,
we consider the problem in the context of citation matching—the problem
of deciding which citations correspond to the same publication. Our
approach is based on the use of a relational probability model to define
a generative model for the domain, including models of author and title
corruption and a probabilistic citation grammar. Identity uncertainty is
handled by extending standard models to incorporate probabilities over
the possible mappings between terms in the language and objects in the
domain. Inference is based on Markov chain Monte Carlo, augmented
with specific methods for generating efficient proposals when the domain
contains many objects. Results on several citation data sets show that
the method outperforms current algorithms for citation matching. The
declarative, relational nature of the model also means that our algorithm
can determine object characteristics such as author names by combining
multiple citations of multiple papers.