Research Team Identification Based on Representation Learning of Academic Heterogeneous Information Network

Academic networks in the real world can usually be described by heterogeneous information networks composed of multiple types of nodes and relationships. Existing representation-learning research for homogeneous information networks lacks the ability to explore the heterogeneity of such networks and therefore cannot be directly applied to heterogeneous information networks. To meet the practical need to identify and discover scientific research teams from academic heterogeneous information networks composed of massive and complex scientific and technological data, this paper proposes a research-team identification method based on representation learning. Node-level and meta-path-level attention mechanisms learn low-dimensional, dense, real-valued vector representations while retaining rich topological information and meta-path semantics. Scientific research teams and important team members are then identified by maximizing node influence. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the comparison methods.