Predicting future influence of papers, researchers, and venues in a dynamic academic network

Performance evaluation and prediction of academic achievements is an essential task for scientists, research organizations, research funding bodies, and government agencies alike. Recently, heterogeneous networks have been used to evaluate or predict performance of multi-entities including papers, researchers, and venues with some success. However, only a minimum of effort has been made to predict the future influence of papers, researchers and venues. In this paper, we propose a new framework WMR-Rank for this purpose. Based on the dynamic and heterogeneous network of multiple entities, we extract seven types of relations among them. The framework supports useful features including the refined granularity of relevant entities such as authors and venues, time awareness for published papers and their citations, differentiating the contribution of multiple coauthors to the same paper, amongst others. By leveraging all seven types of relations and fusing the rich information in a mutually reinforcing style, we are able to predict future influence of papers, authors and venues more precisely. Using the ACL dataset, our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach considerably outperforms state-of-the art competitors.