Towards hierarchical affiliation resolution: framework, baselines, dataset

Author affiliations provide key information when attributing academic performance like publication counts. So far, such measures have been aggregated either manually or only to top-level institutions, such as universities. Supervised affiliation resolution requires a large number of annotated alignments between affiliation strings and known institutions, which are not readily available. We introduce the task of unsupervised hierarchical affiliation resolution , which assigns affiliations to institutions on all hierarchy levels (e.g. departments), discovering the institutions as well as their hierarchical ordering on the fly. From the corresponding requirements, we derive a simple conceptual framework based on the subset partial order that can be extended to account for the discrepancies evident in realistic affiliations from the Web of Science . We implement initial baselines and provide datasets and evaluation metrics for experimentation. Results show that mapping affiliations to known institutions and discovering lower-level institutions works well with simple baselines, whereas unsupervised top-level- and hierarchical resolution is more challenging. Our work provides structured guidance for further in-depth studies and improved methodology by identifying and discussing a number of observed difficulties and important challenges that future work needs to address.