Structure-Guided Entity Resolution: Fine-Tuning LLMs for Robust Name Matching in Complex Linguistic Contexts
This study addresses the challenge of person identity matching across heterogeneous records characterized by linguistic and cultural complexity, diverse naming conventions, and high data noise. To tackle this problem, the authors propose the Structure-Guided Entity Resolution (SGER) framework, which introduces a novel two-stage curriculum fine-tuning strategy: first guiding a large language model to learn the syntactic and semantic structures of personal names, followed by optimizing it for binary entity matching. Evaluated on 50,000 real-world Indian identity record pairs, SGER achieves 99.02% accuracy and an F1 score of 0.994, significantly outperforming few-shot prompting with GPT-4o and single-stage fine-tuning baselines. The method has been deployed on the Dream11 platform, serving over 250 million users, and demonstrates enhanced robustness and precision in multilingual, high-noise entity resolution scenarios.