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: h81101ab13cf8f3bf
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2004
Pagerank: 6.8148535e-05
Overall Rank: 4,087 | 72.53%
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
1,505	Generic Schema Matching, Ten Years Later	2011	VLDB	0.00010454635
1,581	Example-driven Design of Efficient Record Matching Queries	2007	VLDB	0.00010180038
3,304	Multi-column Substring Matching for Database Schema Translation	2006	VLDB	7.4426486e-05
3,403	Benchmarking Declarative Approximate Selection Predicates	2007	SIGMOD	7.3300953e-05
4,439	Incremental Maintenance of Length Normalized Indexes for Approximate String Matching	2009	SIGMOD	6.5998035e-05
6,848	SigMatch: Fast and Scalable Multi-Pattern Matching	2010	VLDB	5.6658226e-05
7,842	Efficient Top-k Algorithms for Approximate Substring Matching	2013	SIGMOD	5.4425932e-05
13,027	SPIDER: Flexible Matching in Databases	2005	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
14,123	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
161	Robust and Efficient Fuzzy Match for Online Data Cleaning	2003	SIGMOD	0.00027718195

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5	6,967	Sampling Dirty Data for Matching Attributes	2010	SIGMOD
6	12,468	Similarity Joins for Uncertain Strings	2014	SIGMOD
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8	7,871	Incorporating String Transformations in Record Matching	2008	SIGMOD
9	2,220	String Similarity Joins: An Experimental Evaluation	2014	VLDB
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