No Arabic abstract
Entity resolution (ER) is the task of identifying all records in a database that refer to the same underlying entity, and are therefore duplicates of each other. Due to inherent ambiguity of data representation and poor data quality, ER is a challenging task for any automated process. As a remedy, human-powered ER via crowdsourcing has become popular in recent years. Using crowd to answer queries is costly and time consuming. Furthermore, crowd-answers can often be faulty. Therefore, crowd-based ER methods aim to minimize human participation without sacrificing the quality and use a computer generated similarity matrix actively. While, some of these methods perform well in practice, no theoretical analysis exists for them, and further their worst case performances do not reflect the experimental findings. This creates a disparity in the understanding of the popular heuristics for this problem. In this paper, we make the first attempt to close this gap. We provide a thorough analysis of the prominent heuristic algorithms for crowd-based ER. We justify experimental observations with our analysis and information theoretic lower bounds.
Entity resolution (ER), an important and common data cleaning problem, is about detecting data duplicate representations for the same external entities, and merging them into single representations. Relatively recently, declarative rules called matching dependencies (MDs) have been proposed for specifying similarity conditions under which attribute values in database records are merged. In this work we show the process and the benefits of integrating three components of ER: (a) Classifiers for duplicate/non-duplicate record pairs built using machine learning (ML) techniques, (b) MDs for supporting both the blocking phase of ML and the merge itself; and (c) The use of the declarative language LogiQL -an extended form of Datalog supported by the LogicBlox platform- for data processing, and the specification and enforcement of MDs.
Entity resolution (ER), an important and common data cleaning problem, is about detecting data duplicate representations for the same external entities, and merging them into single representations. Relatively recently, declarative rules called matching dependencies (MDs) have been proposed for specifying similarity conditions under which attribute values in database records are merged. In this work we show the process and the benefits of integrating four components of ER: (a) Building a classifier for duplicate/non-duplicate record pairs built using machine learning (ML) techniques; (b) Use of MDs for supporting the blocking phase of ML; (c) Record merging on the basis of the classifier results; and (d) The use of the declarative language LogiQL -an extended form of Datalog supported by the LogicBlox platform- for all activities related to data processing, and the specification and enforcement of MDs.
Entity resolution (ER) is the problem of identifying and merging records that refer to the same real-world entity. In many scenarios, raw records are stored under heterogeneous environment. Specifically, the schemas of records may differ from each other. To leverage such records better, most existing work assume that schema matching and data exchange have been done to convert records under different schemas to those under a predefined schema. However, we observe that schema matching would lose information in some cases, which could be useful or even crucial to ER. To leverage sufficient information from heterogeneous sources, in this paper, we address several challenges of ER on heterogeneous records and show that none of existing similarity metrics or their transformations could be applied to find similar records under heterogeneous settings. Motivated by this, we design the similarity function and propose a novel framework to iteratively find records which refer to the same entity. Regarding efficiency, we build an index to generate candidates and accelerate similarity computation. Evaluations on real-world datasets show the effectiveness and efficiency of our methods.
Probabilistic databases play a preeminent role in the processing and management of uncertain data. Recently, many database research efforts have integrated probabilistic models into databases to support tasks such as information extraction and labeling. Many of these efforts are based on batch oriented inference which inhibits a realtime workflow. One important task is entity resolution (ER). ER is the process of determining records (mentions) in a database that correspond to the same real-world entity. Traditional pairwise ER methods can lead to inconsistencies and low accuracy due to localized decisions. Leading ER systems solve this problem by collectively resolving all records using a probabilistic graphical model and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) inference. However, for large datasets this is an extremely expensive process. One key observation is that, such exhaustive ER process incurs a huge up-front cost, which is wasteful in practice because most users are interested in only a small subset of entities. In this paper, we advocate pay-as-you-go entity resolution by developing a number of query-driven collective ER techniques. We introduce two classes of SQL queries that involve ER operators --- selection-driven ER and join-driven ER. We implement novel variations of the MCMC Metropolis Hastings algorithm to generate biased samples and selectivity-based scheduling algorithms to support the two classes of ER queries. Finally, we show that query-driven ER algorithms can converge and return results within minutes over a database populated with the extraction from a newswire dataset containing 71 million mentions.
Entity Resolution (ER) aims to identify whether two tuples refer to the same real-world entity and is well-known to be labor-intensive. It is a prerequisite to anomaly detection, as comparing the attribute values of two matched tuples from two different datasets provides one effective way to detect anomalies. Existing ER approaches, due to insufficient feature discovery or error-prone inherent characteristics, are not able to achieve stable performance. In this paper, we present CollaborER, a self-supervised entity resolution framework via multi-features collaboration. It is capable of (i) obtaining reliable ER results with zero human annotations and (ii) discovering adequate tuples features in a fault-tolerant manner. CollaborER consists of two phases, i.e., automatic label generation (ALG) and collaborative ER training (CERT). In the first phase, ALG is proposed to generate a set of positive tuple pairs and a set of negative tuple pairs. ALG guarantees the high quality of the generated tuples and hence ensures the training quality of the subsequent CERT. In the second phase, CERT is introduced to learn the matching signals by discovering graph features and sentence features of tuples collaboratively. Extensive experimental results over eight real-world ER benchmarks show that CollaborER outperforms all the existing unsupervised ER approaches and is comparable or even superior to the state-of-the-art supervised ER methods.