An improved author-topic (AT) model with authorship credit allocation schemes

Abstract

Authorship credit allocation schemes have attracted considerable research attention. However, no consensus about which one is the best has been attained until now, and limited evidence from practical tasks has been reported. Therefore, this study uses the author interest discovery task as a real-world task case to provide valuable insights into authorship credit allocation schemes and guidelines for further practical applications. For this purpose, a novel model, ATcredit, is proposed to strengthen the Author-Topic (AT) model with an authorship credit allocation scheme, and collapsed Gibbs sampling is used to approximate the posterior and estimate model parameters. Extensive experiments using the SynBio dataset reveal several interesting findings as follows. (a) Any scheme for allocating unequal authorship credits performs better than its equal-credit counterpart with our ATcredit model in terms of perplexity. (b) The fixed versions of four out of the six schemes work better than their flexible counterparts with our ATcredit model, regardless of the hyper-authorship strategy. (c) The variation coefficient of credit awards can serve as a criterion to decide whether the hyper-authorship strategy should be used. (d) When the number of authors in a scholarly article is less than three, the six authorship credit allocation schemes are similar to each other with our ATcredit model in terms of perplexity. (e) The harmonic counting scheme performs the best, followed by the arithmetic counting scheme, and the network-based counting scheme performs the worst with our ATcredit model in terms of perplexity. (f) The arithmetic counting scheme is similar to the harmonic counting scheme in terms of the normalised mutual information (NMI) of discovered interests, but the geometric counting scheme is different from the axiomatic and network-based counting schemes.