Comparative Analysis of Approximate Blocking Techniques for Entity Resolution

Summary: Empirically evaluates 17 entity-resolution blocking methods across 13 real and synthetic benchmarks, spanning millions of entities. Introduces a lifecycle-based taxonomy and formalizes default/best parameter selection to expose configuration sensitivity, scalability, and recall–efficiency trade-offs. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: h8b29b7b471797c00
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2016
Pagerank: 8.9985078e-05
Overall Rank: 2,120 | 85.80%
DOI: 10.14778/2947618.2947624
PDF: Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. George Papadakis (University of Athens)
2. Jonathan Svirsky (Israel Institute of Technology)
3. Avigdor Gal (Israel Institute of Technology)
4. Themis Palpanas (Paris Descartes University)

BibTeX Citation

@article{papadakis_vldb16,
        title = {{Comparative Analysis of Approximate Blocking Techniques for Entity Resolution}},
        author = {Papadakis, George and Svirsky, Jonathan and Gal, Avigdor and Palpanas, Themis},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '16},
        volume = {9},
        number = {9},
        pages = {684--695},
        doi = {10.14778/2947618.2947624},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2947618.2947624},
        year = {2016}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 20 of 20 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
158	Deep Learning for Entity Matching: A Design Space Exploration	2018	SIGMOD	0.00028049555
2,271	ZeroER: Entity Resolution using Zero Labeled Examples	2020	SIGMOD	8.7110698e-05
2,678	The return of JedAI: End-to-End Entity Resolution for Structured and Semi-Structured Data	2018	VLDB	8.1241179e-05
3,372	Cleaning Denial Constraint Violations through Relaxation	2020	SIGMOD	7.3488827e-05
4,994	Auto-FuzzyJoin: Auto-Program Fuzzy Similarity Joins Without Labeled Examples	2021	SIGMOD	6.3099657e-05
5,070	BEER: Blocking for Effective Entity Resolution	2021	SIGMOD	6.2760011e-05
5,539	Pre-trained Embeddings for Entity Resolution: An Experimental Analysis	2023	VLDB	6.0745352e-05
5,638	Through the Fairness Lens: Experimental Analysis and Evaluation of Entity Matching	2023	VLDB	6.0382694e-05
7,190	FlexER: Flexible Entity Resolution for Multiple Intents	2023	SIGMOD	5.5737453e-05
7,244	Certus: An Effective Entity Resolution Approach with Graph Differential Dependencies (GDDs)	2019	VLDB	5.5606514e-05
7,278	Entity Resolution On-Demand	2022	VLDB	5.5511396e-05
8,611	A Critical Re-evaluation of Neural Methods for Entity Alignment	2022	VLDB	5.2887435e-05
9,823	The Battleship Approach to the Low Resource Entity Matching Problem	2023	SIGMOD	5.1089508e-05
10,047	Hierarchical Entity Resolution using an Oracle	2022	SIGMOD	5.0786422e-05
10,049	How to Design Robust Algorithms using Noisy Comparison Oracle	2021	VLDB	5.0786422e-05
10,217	Progressive Entity Matching: A Design Space Exploration	2025	SIGMOD	5.0461625e-05
10,242	Blocker and Matcher Can Mutually Benefit: A Co-Learning Framework for Low-Resource Entity Resolution	2024	VLDB	5.0418764e-05
10,604	In-context Clustering-based Entity Resolution with Large Language Models: A Design Space Exploration	2026	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
10,819	ALER: An Active Learning Hybrid System for Efficient Entity Resolution	2026	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
11,930	Generalized Supervised Meta-blocking	2022	VLDB	4.9605343e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
60	The Merge/Purge Problem for Large Databases	1995	SIGMOD	0.00039343755
108	Approximate String Joins in a Database (Almost) for Free	2001	VLDB	0.00032945275
206	Declarative Data Cleaning: Language, Model, and Algorithms	2001	VLDB	0.00025121652
621	Entity Resolution: Theory, Practice & Open Challenges	2012	VLDB	0.00015460277
1,309	Entity Resolution with Iterative Blocking	2009	SIGMOD	0.00011068452
5,167	Schema-agnostic vs Schema-based Configurations for Blocking Methods on Homogeneous Data	2016	VLDB	6.2335794e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	5,539	Pre-trained Embeddings for Entity Resolution: An Experimental Analysis	2023	VLDB
2	10,242	Blocker and Matcher Can Mutually Benefit: A Co-Learning Framework for Low-Resource Entity Resolution	2024	VLDB
3	1,251	Entity Matching: How Similar Is Similar	2011	VLDB
4	2,520	Deep Learning for Blocking in Entity Matching: A Design Space Exploration	2021	VLDB
5	244	Evaluation of entity resolution approaches on real-world match problems	2010	VLDB
6	11,930	Generalized Supervised Meta-blocking	2022	VLDB
7	5,167	Schema-agnostic vs Schema-based Configurations for Blocking Methods on Homogeneous Data	2016	VLDB
8	3,745	BLAST: a Loosely Schema-aware Meta-blocking Approach for Entity Resolution	2016	VLDB
9	5,085	Supervised Meta-blocking	2014	VLDB
10	1,309	Entity Resolution with Iterative Blocking	2009	SIGMOD