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Boosting Blocking Performance in Entity Resolution Pipelines: Comparison Cleaning using Bloom Filters

Entity Resolution (ER) allows to identify different virtual representations of entities that refer to the same real world entity. When applied to highly heterogeneous data, ER relies on schemaagnostic blocking techniques to improve efficiency while yielding good effectiveness. A drawback of schema-agnostic blocking is the potentially high number of redundant pairwise comparisons. This has led to the introduction of additional efficiency layers beyond blocking in the overall ER pipeline, which all aim at pruning comparisons to reduce the unnecessary time overhead. This paper proposes a novel technique based on Bloom filters that integrates in such an efficiency layer. In addition to avoiding redundant comparisons, it further prunes superfluous comparisons that are unlikely to result in matches when actually compared. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that our approach improves existing approaches in space and time efficiency, with insignificant changes in effectiveness.