Despite the huge amount of recent research efforts on entity resolution (matching) there has not yet been a comparative evaluation on the relative effectiveness and efficiency of alternate approaches. We therefore present such an evaluation of existing implementations on challenging real-world match tasks. We consider approaches both with and without using machine learning to find suitable parameterization and combination of similarity functions. In addition to approaches from the research community we also consider a state-of-the-art commercial entity resolution implementation. Our results indicate significant quality and efficiency differences between different approaches. We also find that some challenging resolution tasks such as matching product entities from online shops are not sufficiently solved with conventional approaches based on the similarity of attribute values.

a b s t r a c tEntity matching is a crucial and difficult task for data integration. Entity matching frameworks provide several methods and their combination to effectively solve different match tasks. In this paper, we comparatively analyze 11 proposed frameworks for entity matching. Our study considers both frameworks which do or do not utilize training data to semiautomatically find an entity matching strategy to solve a given match task. Moreover, we consider support for blocking and the combination of different match algorithms. We further study how the different frameworks have been evaluated. The study aims at exploring the current state of the art in research prototypes of entity matching frameworks and their evaluations. The proposed criteria should be helpful to identify promising framework approaches and enable categorizing and comparatively assessing additional entity matching frameworks and their evaluations.

Product matching is a challenging variation of entity resolution to identify representations and offers referring to the same product. Product matching is highly difficult due to the broad spectrum of products, many similar but different products, frequently missing or wrong values, and the textual nature of product titles and descriptions. We propose the use of tailored approaches for product matching based on a preprocessing of product offers to extract and clean new attributes usable for matching. In particular, we propose a new approach to extract and use so-called product codes to identify products and distinguish them from similar product variations. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches with challenging real-life datasets with product offers from online shops. We also show that the UPC information in product offers is often error-prone and can lead to insufficient match decisions.

We present FEVER, a new evaluation platform for entity resolution approaches. The modular structure of the FEVER framework supports the incorporation or reconstruction of many previously proposed approaches for entity resolution. A distinctive feature of FEVER is that it not only evaluates traditional measures such as precision and recall but also the effort for configuring (e.g., parameter tuning, training) a good entity resolution approach. FE-VER thus strives for a fair comparative evaluation of different approaches by considering both the effectiveness and configuration effort.

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