In entity matching, a fundamental issue while training a classifier to label pairs of entities as either duplicates or nonduplicates is the one of selecting informative examples. Although active learning presents an attractive solution to this problem, previous approaches minimize the misclassification rate (0-1 loss) of the classifier, which is an unsuitable metric for entity matching due to class imbalance (i.e., many more non-duplicate pairs than duplicate pairs). To address this, a recent work [1] proposes to maximize recall of the classifier under the constraint that its precision should be greater than a specified threshold. However, the proposed technique requires the labels of all n input pairs in the worst-case.Our main result is an active learning algorithm that approximately maximizes recall of the classifier under precision constraint with provably sub-linear label complexity (under certain distributional assumptions). Our algorithm uses as a black-box any active learning approach that minimizes 0-1 loss. We show that label complexity of our algorithm is at most log n times the label complexity of the black-box, and also bound the difference in the recall of classifier learnt by our algorithm and the recall of the optimal classifier satisfying the precision constraint. We provide an empirical evaluation of our algorithm on several real-world matching data sets that demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.

Matching product titles from different data feeds that refer to the same underlying product entity is a key problem in online shopping. This matching problem is challenging because titles across the feeds have diverse representations with some missing important keywords like brand and others containing extraneous keywords related to product specifications. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised matching algorithm that leverages web search engines to (1) enrich product titles by adding important missing tokens that occur frequently in search results, and (2) compute importance scores for tokens based on their ability to retrieve other (enriched title) tokens in search results. Our matching scheme calculates the Cosine similarity between enriched title pairs with tokens weighted by their importance scores. We propose an optimization that exploits the templatized structure of product titles to reduce the number of search queries. In experiments with real-life shopping datasets, we found that our matching algorithm has superior F1 scores compared to IDF-based cosine similarity.

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In entity matching, a fundamental issue while training a classifier to label pairs of entities as either duplicates or nonduplicates is the one of selecting informative training examples. Although active learning presents an attractive solution to this problem, previous approaches minimize the misclassification rate (0--1 loss) of the classifier, which is an unsuitable metric for entity matching due to class imbalance (i.e., many more nonduplicate pairs than duplicate pairs). To address this, a recent paper [Arasu et al. 2010] proposes to maximize recall of the classifier under the constraint that its precision should be greater than a specified threshold. However, the proposed technique requires the labels of all n input pairs in the worst case. Our main result is an active learning algorithm that approximately maximizes recall of the classifier while respecting a precision constraint with provably sublinear label complexity (under certain distributional assumptions). Our algorithm uses as a black box any active learning module that minimizes 0--1 loss. We show that label complexity of our algorithm is at most log n times the label complexity of the black box, and also bound the difference in the recall of classifier learnt by our algorithm and the recall of the optimal classifier satisfying the precision constraint. We provide an empirical evaluation of our algorithm on several real-world matching data sets that demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.

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