The Microsoft academic search dataset and KDD Cup 2013

KDD Cup 2013 challenged participants to tackle the problem of author name ambiguity in a digital library of scientific publications. The competition consisted of two tracks, which were based on large-scale datasets from a snapshot of Microsoft Academic Search, taken in January 2013 and including 250K authors and 2.5M papers. Participants were asked to determine which papers in an author profile are truly written by a given author (track 1), as well as to identify duplicate author profiles (track 2). Track 1 and track 2 were launched respectively on April 18 and April 20, 2013, with a common final submission deadline on June 12, 2013. For track 1 a training dataset with correct labels was diclosed at the start of the competition. This track was the most popular one, attracting submissions of 561 different teams. Track 2, which was formulated as an unsupervised learning task, received submissions from 241 participants. This paper presents details about the problem definitions, the datasets, the evaluation metrics and the results.