• Journal of Information Science Theory and Practice
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.6-15
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• 2014

Initial based disambiguation of author names is a common data pre-processing step in bibliometrics. It is widely accepted that this procedure can introduce errors into network data and any subsequent analytical results. What is not sufficiently understood is the precise impact of this step on the data and findings. We present an empirical answer to this question by comparing the impact of two commonly used initial based disambiguation methods against a reasonable proxy for ground truth data. We use DBLP, a database covering major journals and conferences in computer science and information science, as a source. We find that initial based disambiguation induces strong distortions in network metrics on the graph and node level: Authors become embedded in ties for which there is no empirical support, thus increasing their sphere of influence and diversity of involvement. Consequently, networks generated with initial-based disambiguation are more coherent and interconnected than the actual underlying networks, and individual authors appear to be more productive and more strongly embedded than they actually are.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.219-230
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• 2003

This paper describes a rule-based approach for syntactic disambiguation used by the English sentence parser in E-TRAN 2001, an English-Korean machine translation system. We propose Parser's Ambiguity Type Information (PATI) to automatically identify the types of ambiguities observed in competing candidate trees produced by the parser and synthesize the types into a formal representation. PATI provides an efficient way of encoding knowledge into grammar rules and calculating rule preference scores from a relatively small training corpus. In the overall scoring scheme for sorting the candidate trees, the rule preference scores are combined with other preference functions that are based on statistical information. We compare the enhanced grammar with the initial one in terms of the amount of ambiguity. The experimental results show that the rule preference scores could significantly increase the accuracy of ambiguity resolution.