Learning to match and cluster large high-dimensional data sets for data integration

Authors: 
Cohen, William; Richman, Jacob
Author: 
Cohen, W
Richman, J
Year: 
2002
Venue: 
ACM SIGKDD
URL: 
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/775047.775116
DOI: 
10.1145/775047.775116
Citations: 
274
Citations range: 
100 - 499

Part of the process of data integration is determining which sets of identifiers refer to the same real-world entities. In integrating databases found on the Web or obtained by using information extraction methods, it is often possible to solve this problem by exploiting similarities in the textual names used for objects in different databases. In this paper we describe techniques for clustering and matching identifier names that are both scalable and adaptive, in the sense that they can be trained to obtain better performance in a particular domain. An experimental evaluation on a number of sample datasets shows that the adaptive method sometimes performs much better than either of two non-adaptive baseline systems, and is nearly 'always competitive with the best baseline system.