Match, Compare, or Select? An Investigation of Large Language Models for Entity Matching

Tianshu Wang, Xiaoyang Chen, Hongyu Lin, Xuanang Chen, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Hao Wang, Zhenyu Zeng


Abstract
Entity matching (EM) is a critical step in entity resolution (ER). Recently, entity matching based on large language models (LLMs) has shown great promise. However, current LLM-based entity matching approaches typically follow a binary matching paradigm that ignores the global consistency among record relationships. In this paper, we investigate various methodologies for LLM-based entity matching that incorporate record interactions from different perspectives. Specifically, we comprehensively compare three representative strategies: matching, comparing, and selecting, and analyze their respective advantages and challenges in diverse scenarios. Based on our findings, we further design a compound entity matching framework (ComEM) that leverages the composition of multiple strategies and LLMs. ComEM benefits from the advantages of different sides and achieves improvements in both effectiveness and efficiency. Experimental results on 8 ER datasets and 10 LLMs verify the superiority of incorporating record interactions through the selecting strategy, as well as the further cost-effectiveness brought by ComEM.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
96–109
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.8/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tianshu Wang, Xiaoyang Chen, Hongyu Lin, Xuanang Chen, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Hao Wang, and Zhenyu Zeng. 2025. Match, Compare, or Select? An Investigation of Large Language Models for Entity Matching. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 96–109, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Match, Compare, or Select? An Investigation of Large Language Models for Entity Matching (Wang et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.8.pdf