This work addresses the problem of author name homonymy in the Web of
Science. Aiming for an efficient, simple and straightforward solution, we
introduce a novel probabilistic similarity measure for author name
disambiguation based on feature overlap. Using the researcher-ID available for
a subset of the Web of Science, we evaluate the application of this measure in
the context of agglomeratively clustering author mentions. We focus on a
concise evaluation that shows clearly for which problem setups and at which
time during the clustering process our approach works best. In contrast to most
other works in this field, we are sceptical towards the performance of author
name disambiguation methods in general and compare our approach to the trivial
single-cluster baseline. Our results are presented separately for each correct
clustering size as we can explain that, when treating all cases together, the
trivial baseline and more sophisticated approaches are hardly distinguishable
in terms of evaluation results. Our model shows state-of-the-art performance
for all correct clustering sizes without any discriminative training and with
tuning only one convergence parameter.Comment: Proceedings of JCDL 201