APrompt4EM: Augmented Prompt Tuning for Generalized Entity Matching

Generalized Entity Matching (GEM), which aims at judging whether two records represented in different formats refer to the same real-world entity, is an essential task in data management. The prompt tuning paradigm for pre-trained language models (PLMs), including the recent PromptEM model, effectively addresses the challenges of low-resource GEM in practical applications, offering a robust solution when labeled data is scarce. However, existing prompt tuning models for GEM face the challenges of prompt design and information gap. This paper introduces an augmented prompt tuning framework for the challenges, which consists of two main improvements. The first is an augmented contextualized soft token-based prompt tuning method that extracts a guiding soft token benefit for the PLMs' prompt tuning, and the second is a cost-effective information augmentation strategy leveraging large language models (LLMs). Our approach performs well on the low-resource GEM challenges. Extensive experiments show promising advancements of our basic model without information augmentation over existing methods based on moderate-size PLMs (average 5.24%+), and our model with information augmentation achieves comparable performance compared with fine-tuned LLMs, using less than 14% of the API fee.