Machamp: A Generalized Entity Matching Benchmark

Abstract

Entity Matching (EM) refers to the problem of determining whether two different data representations refer to the same real-world entity. It has been a long-standing interest of the data management community. Many efforts have been paid in creating benchmark tasks as well as in developing advanced matching techniques for EM. However, existing benchmark tasks for EM are limited to the case where the two data collections of entities are structured tables with the same schema. Meanwhile, the tables in data collections for matching could be structured, semi-structured, or unstructured in real-world scenarios of data science. In this paper, we come up with a new research problem - Generalized Entity Matching to satisfy this requirement and create a benchmark Machamp for it. Machamp consists of seven tasks having diverse characteristics and thus provides good coverage of use cases in real applications. We summarize existing EM benchmark tasks for structured tables and conduct a series of processing and cleaning efforts to transform them into matching tasks between tables with different structures. Based on that, we further conduct comprehensive profiling of the proposed tasks and evaluate several popular entity matching approaches on them. With the help of Machamp, it is the first time that researchers can evaluate EM techniques between data collections with different structures. It is public available via link: https://github.com/megagonlabs/machamp.