Enhancing entity resolution efficiency with loosely schema-aware techniques - Discussion paper

Entity Resolution, the task of identifying records that refer to the same real-world entity, is a fundamental step in data integration. Blocking is a widely employed technique to avoid the comparison of all possible record pairs in a dataset (an inefficient approach). Renouncing to exploit schema information for blocking has been proved to limit the chance of missing matches (i.e., it guarantees high recall), at the cost of a low precision. Meta-blocking alleviates this issue by restructuring a block collection, removing redundant and superfluous comparisons. Yet, existing meta-blocking techniques exclusively rely on schema-agnostic features. In this paper, we investigate how loose schema information, induced directly from the data, can be exploited in an holistic loosely schema-aware (meta-)blocking approach that outperforms the state-of-the-art meta-blocking in terms of precision, without renouncing high level of recall. We implemented our idea in a system called Blast, and experimentally evaluated it on real-world datasets.