Who is the author "JC Shakespeare"?

Knowledge graphs are tricky beasts to create. Trying to extract semantic metadata from documents is a gargantuan task. Mix them together and you have a recipe for disaster.

While yak-shaving for my MSc, I found an interesting looking research paper authored by one JC Shakespeare.

As you can probably tell from that snippet, there is something a bit hinkey going on here. Here's the page that Google Scholar has scraped:

It's pretty easy to see what has happened here. The algorithm (whether via simple AI or complex regular expression) "knows" that a typical surname followed by a comma followed by a typical given name is almost certainly a reference.

And so "JC Shakespeare" becomes the author of a delightfully diverse set of papers.

Of course, Julius Caesar isn't the only play which gets picked up in this way:

Remember, AI is a great tool. It can be remarkably quick at drawing nearly correct conclusions from a diverse data set. When talking about AI, we usually discuss false positives and false negatives. But we also need to ask "is this the sort of mistake a human would make?"

As it happens, Google has been making this class of mistakes for a few years:

Alex Klotz

@AlexanderRKlotz

Google Scholar has parsed this cafeteria lunch menu as an author list, and it's delightful pic.x.com/jobe6z7bpi

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