Bootstrapping active name disambiguation with crowdsourcing

Name disambiguation is a challenging and important problem in many domains, such as digital libraries, social media management and people search systems. Traditional methods, based on direct assignment using supervised machine learning techniques, seem to be the most effective, but their performances are highly dependent on the amount of training data, while large data annotation can be expensive and time-consuming requiring hours of manual inspection by a domain expert. To efficiently acquire labeled data, we propose a bootstrapping algorithm for the name disambiguation task based on active learning and crowdsourced labeling. We show that the proposed method can leverage the advantages of exploration and exploitation by combining two strategies, thereby improving the overall quality of the training data at minimal expense. The experimental results on two datasets DBLP and ArnetMiner demonstrate the superiority of our framework over existing methods.