P-Swoosh: Parallel Algorithm for Generic Entity Resolution

Abstract

Entity Resolution (ER) is a problem that arises in many information integration applications. ER process identifies duplicated records that refer to the same real-world entity (match process), and derives composite information about the entity (merge process). Additionally, the merged record can match another records recursively. Since the ER process is typically compute-intensive, it is important to distribute the ER workload across multiple processors. In this paper, we propose a parallel algorithm for ER, P-Swoosh, which uses generic match and merge functions and allows load balancing between processors. Our evaluation results using Yahoo! shopping data demonstrates the almost linear scalability from 2 to 15 processors.