Sparkly: A Simple yet Surprisingly Strong TF/IDF Blocker for Entity Matching

Summary: Sparkly: a distributed, share-nothing top-k TF/IDF blocker built on Lucene/Spark with automatic attribute and tokenizer selection for entity matching. Outperforms eight state-of-the-art blockers on recall/output-size/runtime, advocating TF/IDF and top-k blocking as strong, scalable baselines. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 13013
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2023
Pagerank: 4.5859317e-05
Overall Rank: 8,099 | 43.66%
DOI: 10.14778/3583140.3583163

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
9,855	Progressive Entity Matching: A Design Space Exploration	2025	SIGMOD	4.269353e-05
10,040	3dSAGER: Geospatial Entity Resolution over 3D Objects	2026	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
10,617	Deduplicated Sampling On-Demand	2025	VLDB	4.1945683e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 12 of 12 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
155	Robust and Efficient Fuzzy Match for Online Data Cleaning	2003	SIGMOD	0.00040637896
221	Deep Entity Matching with Pre-Trained Language Models	2021	VLDB	0.00033121824
300	Deep Learning for Entity Matching: A Design Space Exploration	2018	SIGMOD	0.00028441466
643	Corleone: Hands-Off Crowdsourcing for Entity Matching	2014	SIGMOD	0.00018754451
712	Magellan: Toward Building Entity Matching Management Systems	2016	VLDB	0.00017732426
754	Distributed Representations of Tuples for Entity Resolution	2018	VLDB	0.00017117211
2,175	Falcon: Scaling Up Hands-Off Crowdsourced Entity Matching to Build Cloud Services	2017	SIGMOD	9.3644117e-05
3,640	Deep Learning for Blocking in Entity Matching: A Design Space Exploration	2021	VLDB	6.8891671e-05
4,689	Algorithmic Aspects of Parallel Query Processing	2018	SIGMOD	5.9980099e-05
5,434	Auto-FuzzyJoin: Auto-Program Fuzzy Similarity Joins Without Labeled Examples	2021	SIGMOD	5.5045402e-05
6,747	Entity Matching Meets Data Science: A Progress Report from the Magellan Project	2019	SIGMOD	4.9408824e-05
11,739	CloudMatcher: A Hands-Off Cloud/Crowd Service for Entity Matching	2018	VLDB	4.1945683e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,650	LocationSpark: A Distributed In-Memory Data Management System for Big Spatial Data	2016	VLDB	6.0234336e-05
9,846	HyperBlocker: Accelerating Rule-based Blocking in Entity Resolution using GPUs	2025	VLDB	4.2721228e-05
11,373	Generalized Supervised Meta-blocking	2022	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
1,201	SPARK: Top-k Keyword Query in Relational Databases	2007	SIGMOD	0.0001334371
5,228	Schema-agnostic vs Schema-based Configurations for Blocking Methods on Homogeneous Data	2016	VLDB	5.6158315e-05
1,410	Entity Resolution with Iterative Blocking	2009	SIGMOD	0.00012127555
4,974	Supervised Meta-blocking	2014	VLDB	5.7903293e-05
3,640	Deep Learning for Blocking in Entity Matching: A Design Space Exploration	2021	VLDB	6.8891671e-05
3,977	BLAST: a Loosely Schema-aware Meta-blocking Approach for Entity Resolution	2016	VLDB	6.5736268e-05
2,514	Comparative Analysis of Approximate Blocking Techniques for Entity Resolution	2016	VLDB	8.6139012e-05