Interpretable and Low-Resource Entity Matching via Decoupling Feature Learning from Decision Making

Zijun Yao, Chengjiang Li, Tiansi Dong, Xin Lv, Jifan Yu, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Yichi Zhang, Zelin Dai


Abstract
Entity Matching (EM) aims at recognizing entity records that denote the same real-world object. Neural EM models learn vector representation of entity descriptions and match entities end-to-end. Though robust, these methods require many annotated resources for training, and lack of interpretability. In this paper, we propose a novel EM framework that consists of Heterogeneous Information Fusion (HIF) and Key Attribute Tree (KAT) Induction to decouple feature representation from matching decision. Using self-supervised learning and mask mechanism in pre-trained language modeling, HIF learns the embeddings of noisy attribute values by inter-attribute attention with unlabeled data. Using a set of comparison features and a limited amount of annotated data, KAT Induction learns an efficient decision tree that can be interpreted by generating entity matching rules whose structure is advocated by domain experts. Experiments on 6 public datasets and 3 industrial datasets show that our method is highly efficient and outperforms SOTA EM models in most cases. We will release the codes upon acceptance.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.215
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2770–2781
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.215
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.215
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zijun Yao, Chengjiang Li, Tiansi Dong, Xin Lv, Jifan Yu, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Yichi Zhang, and Zelin Dai. 2021. Interpretable and Low-Resource Entity Matching via Decoupling Feature Learning from Decision Making. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2770–2781, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Interpretable and Low-Resource Entity Matching via Decoupling Feature Learning from Decision Making (Yao et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.215.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.215.mp4
Code
 THU-KEG/HIF-KAT