Entity Resolution: Theory, Practice & Open Challenges

Summary: A cross-disciplinary survey of Entity Resolution (ER) across databases, ML, NLP, and IR, unifying practical solutions with theoretical underpinnings. It outlines current challenges and open problems, highlighting gaps between practice and theory and guiding future data-management work. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: ha8414aa0a6fc0dbf
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2012
Pagerank: 0.00015460277
Overall Rank: 621 | 95.84%
DOI: 10.14778/2367502.2367558

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Lise Getoor (University of Maryland)
2. Ashwin Machanavajjhala (Duke University)

BibTeX Citation

@article{getoor_vldb12,
        title = {{Entity Resolution: Theory, Practice \& Open Challenges}},
        author = {Getoor, Lise and Machanavajjhala, Ashwin},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '12},
        volume = {5},
        number = {12},
        pages = {2018--2019},
        doi = {10.14778/2367502.2367558},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2367502.2367558},
        year = {2012}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 32 of 32 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
100	HoloClean: Holistic Data Repairs with Probabilistic Inference	2017	VLDB	0.00033951027
158	Deep Learning for Entity Matching: A Design Space Exploration	2018	SIGMOD	0.00028049555
2,120	Comparative Analysis of Approximate Blocking Techniques for Entity Resolution	2016	VLDB	8.9985078e-05
2,271	ZeroER: Entity Resolution using Zero Labeled Examples	2020	SIGMOD	8.7110698e-05
2,825	Saga: A Platform for Continuous Construction and Serving of Knowledge At Scale	2022	SIGMOD	7.9503483e-05
2,954	Distributed Data Deduplication	2016	VLDB	7.8045942e-05
3,329	Keys for Graphs	2015	VLDB	7.4086832e-05
3,672	Online Entity Resolution Using an Oracle	2016	VLDB	7.0926043e-05
3,813	Incremental Record Linkage	2014	VLDB	6.9873544e-05
4,186	Data Integration and Machine Learning: A Natural Synergy	2018	SIGMOD	6.7408641e-05
4,984	PrivateClean: Data Cleaning and Differential Privacy	2016	SIGMOD	6.3150969e-05
5,100	Rotom: A Meta-Learned Data Augmentation Framework for Entity Matching, Data Cleaning, Text Classification, and Beyond	2021	SIGMOD	6.2624729e-05
5,167	Schema-agnostic vs Schema-based Configurations for Blocking Methods on Homogeneous Data	2016	VLDB	6.2335794e-05
5,539	Pre-trained Embeddings for Entity Resolution: An Experimental Analysis	2023	VLDB	6.0745352e-05
6,062	Your notebook is not crumby enough, REPLace it	2020	CIDR	5.8829004e-05
7,190	FlexER: Flexible Entity Resolution for Multiple Intents	2023	SIGMOD	5.5737453e-05
7,431	Linking Temporal Records for Profiling Entities	2015	SIGMOD	5.5137719e-05
7,438	Data Integration and Machine Learning: A Natural Synergy	2018	VLDB	5.5123601e-05
7,601	Robust Entity Resolution using Random Graphs	2018	SIGMOD	5.4714372e-05
8,269	Deep Transfer Learning for Multi-source Entity Linkage via Domain Adaptation	2022	VLDB	5.3491154e-05
8,320	ThriftLLM: On Cost-Effective Selection of Large Language Models for Classification Queries	2025	VLDB	5.3404439e-05
9,370	Enabling Rich Queries Over Heterogeneous Data From Diverse Sources In HealthCare	2020	CIDR	5.1721076e-05
9,420	A Data Quality Metric (DQM): How to Estimate the Number of Undetected Errors in Data Sets	2017	VLDB	5.1672232e-05
9,613	Joint Open Knowledge Base Canonicalization and Linking	2021	SIGMOD	5.1376962e-05
9,744	Ground Truth Inference for Weakly Supervised Entity Matching	2023	SIGMOD	5.1180929e-05
10,047	Hierarchical Entity Resolution using an Oracle	2022	SIGMOD	5.0786422e-05
10,217	Progressive Entity Matching: A Design Space Exploration	2025	SIGMOD	5.0461625e-05
10,280	Towards Interpretable and Learnable Risk Analysis for Entity Resolution	2020	SIGMOD	5.0334833e-05
10,604	In-context Clustering-based Entity Resolution with Large Language Models: A Design Space Exploration	2026	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
10,614	3dSAGER: Geospatial Entity Resolution over 3D Objects	2026	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
12,447	Knowledge Curation and Knowledge Fusion: Challenges, Models, and Applications	2015	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
12,544	YZStack: Provisioning Customizable Solution for Big Data	2014	VLDB	4.9605343e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 9 of 9 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
162	Robust and Efficient Fuzzy Match for Online Data Cleaning	2003	SIGMOD	0.00027626077
231	Reference Reconciliation in Complex Information Spaces	2005	SIGMOD	0.00023797615
244	Evaluation of entity resolution approaches on real-world match problems	2010	VLDB	0.00023265795
264	Record Linkage: Similarity Measures and Algorithms	2006	SIGMOD	0.0002276412
535	On Active Learning of Record Matching Packages	2010	SIGMOD	0.00016768308
1,309	Entity Resolution with Iterative Blocking	2009	SIGMOD	0.00011068452
3,253	Evaluating Entity Resolution Results	2010	VLDB	7.4750552e-05
3,280	Large-Scale Collective Entity Matching	2011	VLDB	7.4495028e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	1,473	Crowdsourcing Algorithms for Entity Resolution	2014	VLDB
2	11,074	LLM-CER: An Interactive System for In-context Clustering-based Entity Resolution with Large Language Models	2026	VLDB
3	3,672	Online Entity Resolution Using an Oracle	2016	VLDB
4	10,604	In-context Clustering-based Entity Resolution with Large Language Models: A Design Space Exploration	2026	SIGMOD
5	2,271	ZeroER: Entity Resolution using Zero Labeled Examples	2020	SIGMOD
6	7,601	Robust Entity Resolution using Random Graphs	2018	SIGMOD
7	3,795	Entity Resolution with Evolving Rules	2010	VLDB
8	12,540	Tutorial: Uncertain Entity Resolution: Re-evaluating Entity Resolution in the Big Data Era	2014	VLDB
9	244	Evaluation of entity resolution approaches on real-world match problems	2010	VLDB
10	5,961	Exploiting Context Analysis for Combining Multiple Entity Resolution Systems	2009	SIGMOD