Match, Compare, or Select? An Investigation of Large Language Models for Entity Matching
Tianshu Wang, Xiaoyang Chen, Hongyu Lin, Xuanang Chen, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Hao Wang, Zhenyu Zeng
Abstract
Entity matching (EM) is a critical step in entity resolution (ER). Recently, entity matching based on large language models (LLMs) has shown great promise. However, current LLM-based entity matching approaches typically follow a binary matching paradigm that ignores the global consistency among record relationships. In this paper, we investigate various methodologies for LLM-based entity matching that incorporate record interactions from different perspectives. Specifically, we comprehensively compare three representative strategies: matching, comparing, and selecting, and analyze their respective advantages and challenges in diverse scenarios. Based on our findings, we further design a compound entity matching framework (ComEM) that leverages the composition of multiple strategies and LLMs. ComEM benefits from the advantages of different sides and achieves improvements in both effectiveness and efficiency. Experimental results on 8 ER datasets and 10 LLMs verify the superiority of incorporating record interactions through the selecting strategy, as well as the further cost-effectiveness brought by ComEM.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{wang-etal-2025-match,
title = "Match, Compare, or Select? An Investigation of Large Language Models for Entity Matching",
author = "Wang, Tianshu and
Chen, Xiaoyang and
Lin, Hongyu and
Chen, Xuanang and
Han, Xianpei and
Sun, Le and
Wang, Hao and
Zeng, Zhenyu",
editor = "Rambow, Owen and
Wanner, Leo and
Apidianaki, Marianna and
Al-Khalifa, Hend and
Eugenio, Barbara Di and
Schockaert, Steven",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
month = jan,
year = "2025",
address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.8/",
pages = "96--109"
}