Yinger Zhang, Shutong Jiang, Renhao Li, Jianhong Tu, Yang Su, Lianghao Deng, Xudong Guo, ChenXu Lv, Junyang Lin. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Data matching - which decides whether two data elements (e.g., string, tuple, column, or knowledge graph entity) are the "same" (a.k.a. a match) - is a key concept in data integration, such as entity matching and schema matching. The widely used practice is to build task-specific or even dataset-specific solutions, which are hard to generalize and disable the opportunities of knowledge sharing that can be learned from different datasets and multiple tasks. In this paper, we propose Unicorn, a unified model for generally supporting common data matching tasks. Unicorn can enable knowledge sharing by learning from multiple tasks and multiple datasets, and can also support zero-shot prediction for new tasks with zero labeled matching/non-matching pairs. However, building such a unified model is challenging due to heterogeneous formats of input data elements and various matching semantics of multiple tasks. To address the challenges, Unicorn employs one generic Encoder that converts any pair of data elements (a, b) into a learned representation, and uses a Matcher, which is a binary classifier, to decide whether a matches b. To align matching semantics of multiple tasks, Unicorn adopts a mixture-of-experts model that enhances the learned representation into a better representation. We conduct extensive experiments using 20 datasets on seven well-studied data matching tasks, and find that our unified model can achieve better performance on most tasks and on average, compared with the state-of-the-art specific models trained for ad-hoc tasks and datasets separately. Moreover, Unicorn can also well serve new matching tasks with zero-shot learning.

Entity resolution (ER) is a core problem of data integration. The state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on ER are achieved by deep learning (DL) based methods, trained with a lot of labeled matching/non-matching entity pairs. This may not be a problem when using well-prepared benchmark datasets. Nevertheless, for many real-world ER applications, the situation changes dramatically, with a painful issue to collect large-scale labeled datasets. In this paper, we seek to answer: If we have a well-labeled source ER dataset, can we train a DL-based ER model for a target dataset, without any labels or with a few labels? This is known as domain adaptation (DA), which has achieved great successes in computer vision and natural language processing, but is not systematically studied for ER. Our goal is to systematically explore the benefits and limitations of a wide range of DA methods for ER. To this purpose, we develop a DADER (Domain Adaptation for Deep Entity Resolution) framework that significantly advances ER in applying DA. We define a space of design solutions for the three modules of DADER, namely Feature Extractor, Matcher, and Feature Aligner. We conduct so far the most comprehensive experimental study to explore the design space and compare different choices of DA for ER. We provide guidance for selecting appropriate design solutions based on extensive experiments.

Entity resolution (ER) is a core data integration problem that identifies pairs of data instances referring to the same real-world entities, and the state-of-the-art results of ER are achieved by deep learning (DL) based approaches. However, DL-based approaches typically require a large amount of labeled training data (i.e. , matching and non-matching pairs), which incurs substantial manual labeling efforts. In this paper, we introduce DADER , a hands-off deep ER system through domain adaptation. DADER utilizes multiple well-labeled source ER datasets to train a DL-based ER model for a new target ER dataset that does not have any labels or with only a few labels. To address the key challenge of domain shift, DADER judiciously selects labeled entity pairs from the source and then aligns distributions of the source and the target by using six popular domain adaptation strategies. DADER can also harness the users to gather a few labels for further improvement. We have built DADER as an open-sourced Python Library with intuitive APIs and demonstrated its utility on supporting hands-off ER in real-world scenarios.

Can AI help automate human-easy but computer-hard data preparation tasks that burden data scientists, practitioners, and crowd workers? We answer this question by presenting RPT, a denoising autoencoder for tuple-to-X models (" X " could be tuple, token, label, JSON, and so on). RPT is pre-trained for a tuple-to-tuple model by corrupting the input tuple and then learning a model to reconstruct the original tuple. It adopts a Transformer-based neural translation architecture that consists of a bidirectional encoder (similar to BERT) and a left-to-right autoregressive decoder (similar to GPT), leading to a generalization of both BERT and GPT. The pre-trained RPT can already support several common data preparation tasks such as data cleaning, auto-completion and schema matching. Better still, RPT can be fine-tuned on a wide range of data preparation tasks, such as value normalization, data transformation, data annotation, etc. To complement RPT, we also discuss several appealing techniques such as collaborative training and few-shot learning for entity resolution, and few-shot learning and NLP question-answering for information extraction. In addition, we identify a series of research opportunities to advance the field of data preparation.