GRAND-HC: Graph-Refined Author Name Disambiguation

Abstract

From-Scratch Name Disambiguation (SND) groups papers sharing an ambiguous name into clusters of distinct real-world authors. Existing methods suffer from two critical limitations: (1) inherent long-tailed author distribution biases representation learning, causing over-merging of tail authors; (2) existing cluster number estimation methods are unreliable for long paper sequences, hindering large-scale deployment. We propose \textbf{GRAND-HC}, a complete end-to-end SND framework. We construct a heterogeneous paper graph via co-author, co-organization, and co-venue relations, using a graph attention network as the embedding backbone. \textbf{Harmony Contrastive Learning (HCL)} dynamically reweights training loss to suppress overfitting to prolific authors, learning discriminative embeddings. A \textbf{Graph-Refined Distance Matrix (GRDM)} leverages graph topology to optimize pairwise distances, further preventing tail author over-merging. Meanwhile, a lightweight \textbf{Paper Compression Module (PCM)} achieves accurate cluster number estimation across varying scales. Finally, Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering outputs the final clusters. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art macro F1 performance. GRAND-HC has been deployed in a billion-scale academic database. Source code: https://github.com/baokou-fw2/GRAND-HC.