Entity matching is the task of linking records from different sources that refer to the same real-world entity. Past work has primarily treated entity linking as a standard supervised learning problem. However, supervised entity matching models often do not generalize well to new data, and collecting exhaustive labeled training data is often cost prohibitive. Further, recent efforts have adopted LLMs for this task in few/zero-shot settings, exploiting their general knowledge. But LLMs are prohibitively expensive for performing inference at scale for real-world entity matching tasks.As an efficient alternative, we re-cast entity matching as a conditional generation task as opposed to binary classification. This enables us to “distill” LLM reasoning into smaller entity matching models via natural language explanations. This approach achieves strong performance, especially on out-of-domain generalization tests (10.85% F-1) where standalone generative methods struggle. We perform ablations that highlight the importance of explanations, both for performance and model robustness.

Data deduplication is a critical task in data management and mining, focused on consolidating duplicate records that refer to the same entity. Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is a critical class of data for deduplication across various industries. Consumer data, stored and generated through various engagement channels, is crucial for marketers, agencies, and publishers. However, a major challenge to PII data deduplication is the lack of open-source benchmark datasets due to stringent privacy concerns, which hinders the research, development, and evaluation of robust solutions.This paper addresses this critical lack of PII deduplication benchmarks by introducing the first open-source, high-quality dataset for this task. We provide two datasets: one with 1,000,000 unlabeled synthetic PII profiles and a subset of 10,000 pairs curated and labeled by trained annotators as matches or non-matches. Our datasets contain synthetic profiles built from publicly available sources that do not represent any real individuals, thus ensuring privacy and ethical compliance. We provide several challenging data variations to evaluate the effectiveness of various deduplication techniques, including traditional supervised methods, deep-learning approaches, and large language models (LLMs). Our work aims to set a new standard for PII deduplication, paving the way for more accurate and secure solutions. We share our data publicly at this link - https://zenodo.org/records/13932202.

The emergence of large-scale pre-trained language models has revolutionized various AI research domains. Transformers-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have gradually replaced CNNs and RNNs to unify fields of computer vision and natural language processing. Compared with independent data like images, videos or texts, graphs usually contain rich structural and relational information. Meanwhile, languages, especially natural language, being one of the most expressive mediums, excels in describing complex structures. However, existing work on incorporating graph problems into the generative language modeling framework remains very limited. Considering the rising prominence of LLMs, it becomes essential to explore whether LLMs can also replace GNNs as the foundation model for graphs. In this paper, we propose InstructGLM (Instruction-finetuned Graph Language Model) with highly scalable prompts based on natural language instructions. We use natural language to describe multi-scale geometric structure of the graph and then instruction finetune an LLM to perform graph tasks, which enables Generative Graph Learning. Our method surpasses all GNN baselines on ogbn-arxiv, Cora and PubMed datasets, underscoring its effectiveness and sheds light on generative LLMs as new foundation model for graph machine learning. Our code is available at https://github.com/agiresearch/InstructGLM.

Entity Resolution (ER) is an essential task in data integration and its goal is to find records that represent the same entity in a dataset. Deep learning models, especially large pre-trained language models, have achieved state-of-the-art results on this task. A typical ER pipeline consists of Entity Blocking and Entity Matching: Entity Blocking finds candidate record pairs that potentially match and Entity Matching determines if the pairs match. The goal of the entity blocking step is to include as many matching pairs as possible while including as few non-matching pairs as possible. On the other hand, the blocking task can also be considered as an Information Retrieval (IR) task. However, state-of-the-art neural IR models that are based on large language models have not been evaluated on the ER task. What’s more, the generalization ability of state-of-the-art methods for entity blocking is not well-studied but an import aspect in real-world applications. In this work, we evaluate state-of-the-art models for Entity Blocking along with neural IR models on a wide range of real-world datasets, and also study their in-distribution and out-of-distribution generalization abilities.