D-Swoosh: A Family of Algorithms for Generic, Distributed Entity Resolution

Abstract

Entity resolution (ER) matches and merges records that refer to the same real-world entities, and is typically a compute-intensive process due to complex matching functions and high data volumes. We present a family of algorithms, D-Swoosh, for distributing the ER workload across multiple processors. The algorithms use generic match and merge functions, and ensure that new merged records are distributed to processors that may have matching records. We perform a detailed performance evaluation on a testbed of 15 processors. Our experiments use actual comparison shopping data provided by Yahoo!.