Sebastian Monka, Pramod Anantharam, Thien Vo Minh +1cs.AI cs.CL
Enterprise entity alignment must handle semi-structured records, implicit attributes, and unit or granularity mismatches. Manual matching is still common in practice, but does not scale as schemas and providers evolve. LLM-only matching improves semantic recall, yet can violate structural and physical invariants, producing fluent yet operationally invalid correspondences. We propose constraint-guided mapping (CGM), a neuro-symbolic method with three stages: (i) schema-grounded admissibility constraints with metadata mc = <tau_c, delta_c>, where tau_c denotes the constraint type and delta_c provides executable relation and normalization logic; (ii) constraint-restricted candidate generation with cascade relaxation to guarantee a nonempty feasible set under noise; and (iii) neural ranking with bounded LLM disambiguation restricted to that feasible set. Methodologically, constraints operate as hypothesis-space operators rather than post-hoc validators, enabling controlled degradation under relaxation and auditable, human-guidable decisions. On a controlled structural-decoy benchmark, hard admissibility shrinks the candidate space by ~480x without dropping the GT, and a layer-by-layer ablation shows this gate, not the LLM, is the decisive lift (F1 0.08 to 0.66). The benefit is model-independent and adds no extra inference cost: a small model with constraints matches a frontier LLM used without them at ~28x lower cost. The method, not a single tuned configuration, transfers across seven enterprise makes (macro F1 0.70), each under its own automatically discovered, expert-refinable constraints, and lowers expert effort by ~7x versus spreadsheet workflows. Public Valentine results add an external ranking sanity check and mark the boundary: constraints should be hard only where structural invariants are match-determining.
Giacomo De Colle, Helena Blackmore, Chris Partridgecs.AI cs.DB cs.LO
In this paper we discuss the foundations behind a novel methodology for the validation of semantic mappings between different data sources based upon different foundation ontologies, where the methodology builds a framework based upon the metaphysical commitments of the ontologies. We provide as example the test case of mappings between IES and BFO, and we especially focused on providing cardinality constraints on the mappings between the two ontologies. In order to demonstrate the applicability of our method, we showcased how these principles can be operationalized through SPARQL queries validating the results of a mapping pipeline.
Kaushik Pavani, Ganga Aluri, Pravin Jadhav +2cs.LG cs.AI
We built and evaluated a self-serve entity resolution (ER) system on six benchmarks spanning 864 to 5M records, and three lessons emerged that are absent from existing ER literature. (1) No single matching algorithm wins everywhere - a self-serve pipeline cannot predict its next dataset, so we recommend training several algorithm families per dataset and letting an automatic bake-off pick the winner. (2) Precision and recall need separate fixes, not a shared threshold - precision needs hard rule-based vetoes, recall needs more diverse candidate retrieval. (3) One false-positive link can silently merge unrelated entities - assuming "A matches B" and "B matches C" implies "A matches C" lets a single bad link chain hundreds of records together, so every cross-group merge must be actively re-verified. We hope these lessons save practitioners the months of dead-end experiments that led us to them.
Aaron Steiner, Ralph Peeters, Christian Bizercs.DB cs.CL
Data integration combines heterogeneous data sets into a single, coherent representation. Data integration involves a sequence of interdependent tasks including schema matching, value normalization, entity blocking, entity matching, and data fusion. Existing benchmarks either evaluate these steps in isolation or cover only incomplete versions of the data integration pipeline, omitting specific steps. The lack of public end-to-end data integration benchmarks hinders research on data integration methods that address the integration process as a whole. This paper fills this gap by introducing the Mannheim Data Integration Benchmark (MaDI-Bench), the first benchmark for the end-to-end integration of relational tables covering all steps of the integration process. MaDI-Bench contributes (i) a set of base end-to-end data integration tasks spanning several application domains, each requiring the full schema matching, value normalization, entity matching, and conflict resolution pipeline; and (ii) a generic method for deriving task variants that mitigates rapid benchmark saturation as data integration systems advance. We validate the benchmark using human-engineered pipelines, a best-of-breed pipeline, and an LLM-based pipeline. The validation demonstrates the utility of the benchmark for measuring the step-wise as well as the end-to-end performance of data integration pipelines. All benchmark artifacts are available for public download.
Nicholas Pulsone, Gregory Goren, Roee Shragacs.DB cs.AI cs.LG
Entity Matching (EM) is a core operation in the data integration pipeline, where records from different sources are compared to determine whether they refer to the same real-world entity. Recent work has incorporated domain information and low-resource learning techniques to better adapt EM systems to realistic settings. While these approaches have demonstrated strong performance, it remains unclear how they behave under varying data constraints and levels of supervision in practice. In this paper, we investigate a state-of-the-art method for low-resource, domain-aware EM--BEACON--and study how its performance is affected by different algorithmic choices and data availability conditions. We conduct a series of targeted experiments to evaluate these variations, providing deeper insight into the role of distribution alignment and the behavior of the BEACON framework.
Leonard Traeger, Enas Khwaileh, Andreas Behrend +1cs.DB cs.IR cs.LG
Schema matching, a critical task for integrating data from diverse sources, seeks to identify correspondences between columns across different schemas. In multi-table holistic schema matching, columns with similar semantic meaning may reside in tables with different contexts due to heterogeneous schema designs, where similarity-based techniques are inadequate. The focus of this paper is exploiting referential context into schema matching by introducing RACT learning and prediction, a self-supervised framework enabling the probabilistic retrieval of candidate tables for source columns to constrain relevant column candidates. Experiments demonstrate that this approach outperforms similarity-based baselines on matching multi-table schemas. In subsequent matching experiments, constraining the column search space via top-t tables improves both average matching precision and completeness by up to +70%.