Flexible String Matching Against Large Databases in Practice

Summary: Practical deployment of tf-idf/cosine fuzzy matching on large AT&T databases, extending it across multiple string attributes and semantic equivalences. Engineering optimizations trade slight accuracy loss for major speedups in real data-cleaning workloads. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: 9317
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2004
Pagerank: 6.9612537e-05
Overall Rank: 4,009 | 72.50%
DOI: 10.1016/B978-012088469-8.50094-2

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Nick Koudas (AT&T)
2. Amit Marathe (AT&T)
3. Divesh Srivastava (AT&T)

BibTeX Citation

@article{koudas_vldb04,
        title = {{Flexible String Matching Against Large Databases in Practice}},
        author = {Koudas, Nick and Marathe, Amit and Srivastava, Divesh},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '04},
        pages = {1078--1087},
        doi = {10.1016/B978-012088469-8.50094-2},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-012088469-8.50094-2},
        year = {2004}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 9 of 9 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,497	Generic Schema Matching, Ten Years Later	2011	VLDB	0.00010568859
1,560	Example-driven Design of Efficient Record Matching Queries	2007	VLDB	0.00010361222
3,294	Multi-column Substring Matching for Database Schema Translation	2006	VLDB	7.5491351e-05
3,356	Benchmarking Declarative Approximate Selection Predicates	2007	SIGMOD	7.490881e-05
4,359	Incremental Maintenance of Length Normalized Indexes for Approximate String Matching	2009	SIGMOD	6.7451753e-05
6,716	SigMatch: Fast and Scalable Multi-Pattern Matching	2010	VLDB	5.7958663e-05
7,692	Efficient Top-k Algorithms for Approximate Substring Matching	2013	SIGMOD	5.5664611e-05
12,737	SPIDER: Flexible Matching in Databases	2005	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
13,812	Using SPIDER: An Experience Report	2006	SIGMOD	-

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
158	Robust and Efficient Fuzzy Match for Online Data Cleaning	2003	SIGMOD	0.00028199923

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	13,812	Using SPIDER: An Experience Report	2006	SIGMOD
2	9,702	Towards a Unified Framework for String Similarity Joins	2019	VLDB
3	3,610	Merging the Results of Approximate Match Operations	2004	VLDB
4	107	Approximate String Joins in a Database (Almost) for Free	2001	VLDB
5	6,827	Sampling Dirty Data for Matching Attributes	2010	SIGMOD
6	12,177	Similarity Joins for Uncertain Strings	2014	SIGMOD
7	4,743	Probabilistic String Similarity Joins	2010	SIGMOD
8	7,714	Incorporating String Transformations in Record Matching	2008	SIGMOD
9	2,186	String Similarity Joins: An Experimental Evaluation	2014	VLDB
10	158	Robust and Efficient Fuzzy Match for Online Data Cleaning	2003	SIGMOD