Entity Matching: How Similar Is Similar

Summary: Addresses 'how similar is similar' in entity matching by pruning the space of similarity functions and thresholds. Introduces optimization to remove redundancy and efficient algorithms to pick the best functions, with experiments on real and synthetic data showing improved accuracy over baselines. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: he5f8016c58a8acb0
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2011
Pagerank: 0.00011346515
Overall Rank: 1,247 | 91.62%
DOI: 10.14778/2021017.2021020

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Jiannan Wang (Tsinghua University)
2. Guoliang Li (Tsinghua University)
3. Jeffrey Xu Yu (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
4. Jianhua Feng (Tsinghua University)

BibTeX Citation

@article{wang_vldb11,
        title = {{Entity Matching: How Similar Is Similar}},
        author = {Wang, Jiannan and Li, Guoliang and Yu, Jeffrey Xu and Feng, Jianhua},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '11},
        volume = {4},
        number = {10},
        pages = {622--633},
        doi = {10.14778/2021017.2021020},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2021017.2021020},
        year = {2011}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 17 of 17 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
134	Deep Entity Matching with Pre-Trained Language Models	2021	VLDB	0.00030043481
457	Distributed Representations of Tuples for Entity Resolution	2018	VLDB	0.00017907103
1,493	Synthesizing Entity Matching Rules by Examples	2018	VLDB	0.00010505174
3,013	Saga: A Platform for Continuous Construction and Serving of Knowledge At Scale	2022	SIGMOD	7.7541678e-05
3,197	iCrowd: An Adaptive Crowdsourcing Framework	2015	SIGMOD	7.5455503e-05
3,681	Generating Concise Entity Matching Rules	2017	SIGMOD	7.1014441e-05
4,676	Entity Resolution with Hierarchical Graph Attention Networks	2022	SIGMOD	6.4745561e-05
5,522	MDedup: Duplicate Detection with Matching Dependencies	2020	VLDB	6.0956156e-05
5,623	Through the Fairness Lens: Experimental Analysis and Evaluation of Entity Matching	2023	VLDB	6.0611712e-05
6,397	Human-in-the-loop Data Integration	2017	VLDB	5.7989499e-05
6,544	HYDRA: Large-scale Social Identity Linkage via Heterogeneous Behavior Modeling	2014	SIGMOD	5.7517881e-05
7,181	FlexER: Flexible Entity Resolution for Multiple Intents	2023	SIGMOD	5.5923113e-05
7,226	Certus: An Effective Entity Resolution Approach with Graph Differential Dependencies (GDDs)	2019	VLDB	5.5810344e-05
7,283	PromptEM: Prompt-tuning for Low-resource Generalized Entity Matching	2023	VLDB	5.5665122e-05
10,069	On Concise Set of Relative Candidate Keys	2014	VLDB	5.086676e-05
10,402	Accelerating Approximate Analytical Join Queries over Unstructured Data with Statistical Guarantees	2026	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
11,721	When Automatic Filtering Comes to the Rescue: Pre-Computing Company Competitor Pairs in Owler	2023	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-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	0.000394583
168	Efficient Exact Set-Similarity Joins	2006	VLDB	0.00027163517
204	Declarative Data Cleaning: Language, Model, and Algorithms	2001	VLDB	0.00025190386
262	Record Linkage: Similarity Measures and Algorithms	2006	SIGMOD	0.00022821392
618	Reasoning about Record Matching Rules	2009	VLDB	0.00015536912
1,581	Example-driven Design of Efficient Record Matching Queries	2007	VLDB	0.00010180038

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	9,205	Entity Matching in the Wild: A Consistent and Versatile Framework to Unify Data in Industrial Applications	2020	SIGMOD
2	161	Robust and Efficient Fuzzy Match for Online Data Cleaning	2003	SIGMOD
3	1,581	Example-driven Design of Efficient Record Matching Queries	2007	VLDB
4	3,512	Efficient Approximate Entity Extraction with Edit Distance Constraints	2009	SIGMOD
5	262	Record Linkage: Similarity Measures and Algorithms	2006	SIGMOD
6	2,475	A Comprehensive Benchmark Framework for Active Learning Methods in Entity Matching	2020	SIGMOD
7	2,110	Comparative Analysis of Approximate Blocking Techniques for Entity Resolution	2016	VLDB
8	10,180	Progressive Entity Matching: A Design Space Exploration	2025	SIGMOD
9	5,403	Mining Document Collections to Facilitate Accurate Approximate Entity Matching	2009	VLDB
10	244	Evaluation of entity resolution approaches on real-world match problems	2010	VLDB