14. A system, comprising: a memory; and one or more processors coupled to the memory, wherein the memory comprises program instructions executable by the one or more processors to implement a genetic rule generator configured to: generate a population of candidate rules for detecting duplicates, each duplicate representing different item description information entries that describe a common item, wherein each candidate rule comprises one or more independent rule conditions and one or more elements for each independent rule condition specifying how a portion of one set of item description information should be compared to another set of item description information for duplicate detection; for each candidate rule of the population, apply that rule to a reference data set including known duplicates and non-duplicates in order to determine a measure of that candidate rule's performance with respect to detecting duplicates; assign each candidate rule a fitness score based on the respective performance measurement for that candidate rule, wherein the fitness score of a given candidate rule is representative of that candidate rule's probability of being selected as a parent for a new generation of candidate rules; based on the fitness scores, select a subset of the population of candidate rules as parents for the new generation of candidate rules; change one or more elements of one or more rule conditions of one or more of the parent candidate rules to generate the new generation of candidate rules; and select from the new generation of candidate rules or one or more subsequent generations of candidate rules, one or more rules for inclusion within a rule set for detecting duplicates within item description information.
14. A system, comprising: a memory; and one or more processors coupled to the memory, wherein the memory comprises program instructions executable by the one or more processors to implement a genetic rule generator configured to: generate a population of candidate rules for detecting duplicates, each duplicate representing different item description information entries that describe a common item, wherein each candidate rule comprises one or more independent rule conditions and one or more elements for each independent rule condition specifying how a portion of one set of item description information should be compared to another set of item description information for duplicate detection; for each candidate rule of the population, apply that rule to a reference data set including known duplicates and non-duplicates in order to determine a measure of that candidate rule's performance with respect to detecting duplicates; assign each candidate rule a fitness score based on the respective performance measurement for that candidate rule, wherein the fitness score of a given candidate rule is representative of that candidate rule's probability of being selected as a parent for a new generation of candidate rules; based on the fitness scores, select a subset of the population of candidate rules as parents for the new generation of candidate rules; change one or more elements of one or more rule conditions of one or more of the parent candidate rules to generate the new generation of candidate rules; and select from the new generation of candidate rules or one or more subsequent generations of candidate rules, one or more rules for inclusion within a rule set for detecting duplicates within item description information. 15. The system of claim 14 , wherein to generate the new generation of candidate rules, the genetic rule generator is configured to perform one or more mutation operations on rule conditions passed from parent candidate rules to candidate rules of the new generation.