Abstract: As the large-scale network data widely exists in various domains, complex network has drawn plenty of research attention. Among these researches, network alignment is a novel research topic proposed in recent years, which aims at revealing the underlying alignment among networks. For example, aligning online social networks by whether the accounts are held by the same user. Aligning the isolated networks leads to network data integration and provides pre-required data for subsequent researches and applications. Researchers have proposed several network aligners according to different scenarios. In this manuscript, we summarize the existing works and discuss the future directions for network alignment.

Key words: network alignment, protein-protein interaction networks, social network