Papers › AutoBlock: A Hands-off Blocking Framework for Entity Matching

AutoBlock: A Hands-off Blocking Framework for Entity Matching

7 Dec 2019arXiv:1912.03417archive 2025-07-28

Wei Zhang, Hao Wei, Bunyamin Sisman, Xin Luna Dong, Christos Faloutsos, David Page

Entity matching seeks to identify data records over one or multiple data sources that refer to the same real-world entity. Virtually every entity matching task on large datasets requires blocking, a step that reduces the number of record pairs to be matched. However, most of the traditional blocking methods are learning-free and key-based, and their successes are largely built on laborious human effort in cleaning data and designing blocking keys. In this paper, we propose AutoBlock, a novel hands-off blocking framework for entity matching, based on similarity-preserving representation learning and nearest neighbor search. Our contributions include: (a) Automation: AutoBlock frees users from laborious data cleaning and blocking key tuning. (b) Scalability: AutoBlock has a sub-quadratic total time complexity and can be easily deployed for millions of records. (c) Effectiveness: AutoBlock outperforms a wide range of competitive baselines on multiple large-scale, real-world datasets, especially when datasets are dirty and/or unstructured.

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BlockingEntity ResolutionRepresentation Learning

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