Optimizing sample selection for large language model-based entity matching using AssistEM
摘要
The meteoric rise of large language models (LLMs) has reshaped natural language processing, inspiring new approaches to data integration tasks such as entity matching (EM). While proprietary models like GPT-4 deliver strong performance, open-source alternatives (e.g., Mistral, DeciLM, Gemma-3) require supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to excel in specialized domains. However, naïvely training billion-parameter scale LLMs on uncurated corpora is computationally prohibitive and environmentally costly, often taking days while introducing inefficiencies that limit rapid application deployment. We introduce AssistEM, a framework for efficient LLM adaptation to EM via principled data selection. AssistEM integrates NER and TF-IDF signals into a composite score, filters entity pairs with domain-level thresholds, constructs denoised semantic embeddings, and applies graph-based clustering with class-aware sampling to obtain a compact yet representative set of