Matching Feature Separation Network for Domain Adaptation in Entity Matching

Entity matching (EM) determines whether two records from different data sources refer to the same real-world entity. It is a fundamental task in knowledge graph construction and data integration. Currently, deep learning (DL) based EM methods have achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) results. However, apply-ing DL-based EM methods often costs a lot of human efforts to label the data. To address this challenge, we propose a new do-main adaptation (DA) framework for EM called Matching Fea-ture Separation Network (MFSN). We implement DA by sepa-rating private and common matching features. Briefly, MFSN first uses three encoders to explicitly model the private and common matching features in both the source and target do-mains. Then, it transfers the knowledge learned from the source common matching features to the target domain. We also pro-pose an enhanced variant called Feature Representation and Separation Enhanced MFSN (MFSN-FRSE). Compared with MFSN, it has superior feature representation and separation capabilities. We evaluate the effectiveness of MFSN and MFSN-FRSE on twelve DA in EM tasks. The results show that our framework is approximately 7% higher in F1 score on average than the previous SOTA methods. Then, we verify the effec-tiveness of each module in MFSN and MFSN-FRSE by ablation study. Finally, we explore the optimal strategy of each module in MFSN and MFSN-FRSE through detailed tests.