Using an open-source, Java toolkit of name-matching methods, we experimentally compare string distance metrics on the task of matching entity names. We investigate a number of different metrics proposed by different communities, including edit-distance metrics, fast heuristic string comparators, token-based distance metrics, and hybrid methods. Overall, the best-performing method is a hybrid scheme combining a TFIDF weighting scheme, which is widely used in information retrieval, with the Jaro-Winkler string-distance scheme, which was developed in the probabilistic record linkage community.

An increasing number of data sources now become available on the Web, but often their contents are only accessible through query interfaces. For a domain of interest, there often exist many such sources with varied coverage or querying capabilities. As an important step to the integration of these sources, we consider the integration of their query interfaces. More specifically, we focus on the crucial step of the integration: accurately matching the interfaces. While the integration of query interfaces has received more attentions recently, current approaches are not sufficiently general: (a) they all model interfaces with flat schemas; (b) most of them only consider 1:1 mappings of fields over the interfaces; (c) they all perform the integration in a blackbox-like fashion and the whole process has to be restarted from scratch if anything goes wrong; and (d) they often require laborious parameter tuning. In this paper, we propose an interactive, clustering-based approach to matching query interfaces. The hierarchical nature of interfaces is captured with ordered trees. Varied types of complex mappings of fields are examined and several approaches are proposed to effectively identify these mappings. We put the human integrator back in the loop and propose several novel approaches to the interactive learning of parameters and the resolution of uncertain mappings. Extensive experiments are conducted and results show that our approach is highly effective. 1.

We describe an open-source Java toolkit of methods for matching names and records. We summarize results obtained from using various string distance metrics on the task of matching entity names. These metrics include distance functions proposed by several different communities, such as edit-distance metrics, fast heuristic string comparators, token-based distance metrics, and hybrid methods. We then describe an extension to the toolkit which allows records to be compared. We discuss

Many databases contain uncertain and imprecise references to real-world entities. The absence of identifiers for the underlying entities often results in a database which contains multiple references to the same entity. This can lead not only to data redundancy, but also inaccuracies in query processing and knowledge extraction. These problems can be alleviated through the use of entity resolution. Entity resolution involves discovering the underlying entities and mapping each database reference to these entities. Traditionally, entities are resolved using pairwise similarity over the attributes of references. However, there is often additional relational information in the data. Specifically, references to different entities may cooccur. In these cases, collective entity resolution, in which entities for cooccurring references are determined jointly rather than independently, can improve entity resolution accuracy. We propose a novel relational clustering algorithm that uses both attribute and relational information for determining the underlying domain entities, and we give an efficient implementation. We investigate the impact that different relational similarity measures have on entity resolution quality. We evaluate our collective entity resolution algorithm on multiple real-world databases. We show that it improves entity resolution performance over both attribute-based baselines and over algorithms that consider relational information but do not resolve entities collectively. In addition, we perform detailed experiments on synthetically generated data to identify data characteristics that favor collective relational resolution over purely attribute-based algorithms.

Entity resolution has received considerable attention in recent years. Given many references to underlying entities, the goal is to predict which references correspond to the same entity. We show how to extend the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model for this task and propose a probabilistic model for collective entity resolution for relational domains where references are connected to each other. Our approach differs from other recently proposed entity resolution approaches in that it is a) generative, b) does not make pair-wise decisions and c) captures relations between entities through a hidden group variable. We propose a novel sampling algorithm for collective entity resolution which is unsupervised and also takes entity relations into account. Additionally, we do not assume the domain of entities to be known and show how to infer the number of entities from the data. We demonstrate the utility and practicality of our relational entity resolution approach for author resolution in two real-world bibliographic datasets. In addition, we present preliminary results on characterizing conditions under which relational information is useful.

Entity resolution is the problem of determining which records in a database refer to the same entities, and is a crucial and expensive step in the data mining process. Interest in it has grown rapidly in recent years, and many approaches have been proposed. However, they tend to address only isolated aspects of the problem, and are often ad hoc. This paper proposes a well-founded, integrated solution to the entity resolution problem based on Markov logic. Markov logic combines first-order logic and probabilistic graphical models by attaching weights to first-order formulas, and viewing them as templates for features of Markov networks. We show how a number of previous approaches can be formulated and seamlessly combined in Markov logic, and how the resulting learning and inference problems can be solved efficiently. Experiments on two citation databases show the utility of this approach, and evaluate the contribution of the different components. 1

Abstract. Ontologies are today a key part of every knowledge based system. They provide a source of shared and precisely defined terms, resulting in system interoperability by knowledge sharing and reuse. Unfortunately, the variety of ways that a domain can be conceptualized results in the creation of different ontologies with contradicting or overlapping parts. For this reason ontologies need to be brought into mutual agreement (aligned). One important method for ontology alignment is the comparison of class and property names of ontologies using stringdistance metrics. Today quite a lot of such metrics exist in literature. But all of them have been initially developed for different applications and fields, resulting in poor performance when applied in this new domain. In the current paper we present a new string metric for the comparison of names which performs better on the process of ontology alignment as well as to many other field matching problems. 1

Most data integration applications require a matching between the schemas of the respective data sets. We show how the existence of duplicates within these data sets can be exploited to automatically identify matching attributes. We describe an algorithm that first discovers duplicates among data sets with unaligned schemas and then uses these duplicates to perform schema matching between schemas with opaque column names. Discovering

The need to measure sequence similarity arises in information extraction, object identity, data mining, biological sequence analysis, and other domains. This paper presents discriminative string-edit CRFs, a finitestate conditional random field model for edit sequences between strings. Conditional random fields have advantages over generative approaches to this problem, such as pair HMMs or the work of Ristad and Yianilos, because as conditionally-trained methods, they enable the use of complex, arbitrary actions and features of the input strings. As in generative models, the training data does not have to specify the edit sequences between the given string pairs. Unlike generative models, however, our model is trained on both positive and negative instances of string pairs. We present positive experimental results on several data sets. 1

In this paper, we consider the problem of ambiguous author names in bibliographic citations, and comparatively study alternative approaches to identify and correct such name variants (e.g., "Vannevar Bush" and "V. Vush"). Our study is based on a scalable two-step framework, where step 1 is to substantially reduce the number of candidates via blocking, and step 2 is to measure the distance of two names via coauthor information. Combining four blocking methods and seven distance measures on four data sets, we present extensive experimental results, and identify combinations that are scalable and effective to disambiguate author names in citations.