1. An apparatus comprising: a processing device comprising a processor having an associated memory; wherein the processing device is operative: to obtain a plurality of data objects; to construct a binary tree using a bipartition procedure in which subsets of the data objects are associated with respective nodes of the tree, wherein evaluation of a designated modularity for a given one of the nodes of the tree is used as a stopping criterion to prevent further partitioning of that node and to indicate designation of that node as a leaf node of the tree, and wherein resulting leaf nodes of the tree provide a non-overlapping partitioning of the plurality of data objects; to perform a neighborhood search on the tree to identify pairs of the plurality of data objects that match a same entity based on at least one pairwise similarity metric; and to store an indication of said identified pairs of matching data objects in the associated memory; and wherein the neighborhood search utilizes a first similarity threshold to compare a pair of data objects that are each associated with a same leaf node of the binary tree and utilizes a second similarity threshold different than the first similarity threshold to compare another pair of data objects that are each respectively associated with a different leaf node of the binary tree.