Rule-Based Method for Entity Resolution

Abstract

The objective of entity resolution (ER) is to identify records referring to the same real-world entity. Traditional ER approaches identify records based on pairwise similarity comparisons, which assumes that records referring to the same entity are more similar to each other than otherwise. However, this assumption does not always hold in practice and similarity comparisons do not work well when such assumption breaks. We propose a new class of rules which could describe the complex matching conditions between records and entities. Based on this class of rules, we present the rule-based entity resolution problem and develop an on-line approach for ER. In this framework, by applying rules to each record, we identify which entity the record refers to. Additionally, we propose an effective and efficient rule discovery algorithm. We experimentally evaluated our rule-based ER algorithm on real data sets. The experimental results show that both our rule discovery algorithm and rule-based ER algorithm can achieve high performance.