Eliminating the redundancy in blocking-based entity resolution methods

Abstract

Entity resolution is the task of identifying entities that refer to the same real-world object. It has important applications in the context of digital libraries, such as citation matching and author disambiguation. Blocking is an established methodology for efficiently addressing this problem; it clusters similar entities together, and compares solely entities inside each cluster. In order to effectively deal with the current large, noisy and heterogeneous data collections, novel blocking methods that rely on redundancy have been introduced: they associate each entity with multiple blocks in order to increase recall, thus increasing the computational cost, as well.