Clean Me If You Can: A Large Collection of Real-World Addresses for Data Cleaning Benchmarking

2026-06-30

AI Summary

This study addresses a critical gap in data cleaning research—the lack of large-scale, real-world dirty datasets that hinder the effective evaluation of methods in practical settings. To bridge this gap, the authors construct the first large-scale dirty dataset comprising real postal addresses paired with their ground-truth counterparts. Leveraging this dataset, they conduct a systematic benchmarking study of state-of-the-art data cleaning approaches. Their experiments reveal substantial limitations of current methods when applied to real-world data, underscoring the need for more robust and context-aware techniques. The dataset and empirical findings not only establish a reliable benchmark for future research but also provide actionable insights to guide the development of data cleaning solutions tailored to real-world applications.

Abstract

There has been extensive research on automating and scaling data cleaning, i.e., the detection and correction of erroneous values in tabular data. Yet, existing approaches often perform well only within controlled environments. One of the major bottlenecks in data cleaning research is the lack of real-world datasets. In this paper, we address this gap by providing a large, dirty dataset with postal entries and their corresponding ground truth. We discuss the design decisions and challenges for obtaining the dataset. We demonstrate the limitations of existing cleaning approaches when faced with our proposed datasets and derive guidelines for future research.

Problem

• data cleaning
• real-world datasets
• dirty data
• benchmarking
• tabular data

Innovation

• data cleaning
• real-world dataset
• benchmarking
• dirty data
• address normalization