Author name ambiguity in a digital library may affect the findings of research that mines authorship data of the library. This study evaluates author name disambiguation in DBLP, a widely used but insufficiently evaluated digital library for its disambiguation performance. In doing so, this study takes a triangulation approach that author name disambiguation for a digital library can be better evaluated when its performance is assessed on multiple labeled datasets with comparison to baselines. Tested on three types of labeled data containing 5000 to 6 M disambiguated names, DBLP is shown to assign author names quite accurately to distinct authors, resulting in pairwise precision, recall, and F1 measures around 0.90 or above overall. DBLP's author name disambiguation performs well even on large ambiguous name blocks but deficiently on distinguishing authors with the same names. Compared to other disambiguation algorithms, DBLP's disambiguation performance is quite competitive, possibly due to its hybrid disambiguation approach combining algorithmic disambiguation and manual error correction. A discussion follows on strengths and weaknesses of labeled datasets used in this study for future efforts to evaluate author name disambiguation on a digital library scale.

In supervised machine learning for author name disambiguation, negative training data are often dominantly larger than positive training data. This paper examines how the ratios of negative to positive training data can affect the performance of machine learning algorithms to disambiguate author names in bibliographic records. On multiple labeled datasets, three classifiers-Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, and Random Forest-are trained through representative features such as coauthor names, and title words extracted from the same training data but with various positive-to-negative training data ratios. Results show that increasing negative training data can improve disambiguation performance but with a few percent of performance gains and sometimes degrade it. Logistic and Naive Bayes learn optimal disambiguation models even with a base ratio (1:1) of positive and negative training data. Also, the performance improvement by Random Forest tends to quickly saturate roughly after 1:10 similar to 1:15. These findings imply that contrary to the common practice using all training data, name disambiguation algorithms can be trained using part of negative training data without degrading much disambiguation performance while increasing computational efficiency. This study calls for more attention from author name disambiguation scholars to methods for machine learning from imbalanced data.