Shifu: Deep learning based advisor-advisee relationship mining in scholarly big data

Scholars in academia are involved in various social relationships such as advisor-advisee relationships. The analysis of such relationship can provide invaluable information for understanding the interactions among scholars as well as providing many researcher-specific applications such as advisor recommendation and academic rising star identification. However, in most cases, high quality advisor-advisee relationship dataset is unavailable. To address this problem, we propose Shifu, a deep-learning-based advisor-advisee relationship identification method which takes into account both the local properties and network characteristics. In particular, we explore how to crawl advisor-advisee pairs from PhDtree project and extract their publication information by matching them with DBLP dataset as the experimental dataset. To the best of our knowledge, no prior effort has been made to address the scientific collaboration network features for relationship identification by exploiting deep learning. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art machine learning methods in precision (94%). Furthermore, we apply Shifu to the entire DBLP dataset and obtain a large-scale advisor-advisee relationship dataset.