Smurf

Abstract

We argue that more attention should be devoted to developing self-service string matching (SM) solutions, which lay users can easily use. We show that Falcon, a self-service entity matching (EM) solution, can be applied to SM and is more accurate than current self-service SM solutions. However, Falcon often asks lay users to label many string pairs (e.g., 770-1050 in our experiments). This is expensive, can significantly compound labeling mistakes, and takes a long time. We developed Smurf, a self-service SM solution that reduces the labeling effort by 43-76%, yet achieves comparable F 1 accuracy. The key to make Smurf possible is a novel solution to efficiently execute a random forest (that Smurf learns via active learning with the lay user) over two sets of strings. This solution uses RDBMS-style plan optimization to reuse computations across the trees in the forest. As such, Smurf significantly advances self-service SM and raises interesting future directions for self-service EM and scalable random forest execution over structured data.