Learning from unknown-unknowns: inconsistency-driven sampling for improving LLM entity matching

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.47989/ir31iConf64127

Keywords:

Digital literacy, Academic library, Digital literacy education, Theoretical research

Abstract

Introduction. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate high performance in entity matching, the ‘unknown-unknown’ problem, where models confidently make incorrect predictions, remains a significant challenge. This research focuses on the manifestation of this problem as logical inconsistencies, such as violations of transitivity (e.g., A=B and B=C, but A≠C) across multiple matching decisions.  

Method. ‘Inconsistent triangles,’ in which the transitive law is violated among three entities, were detected, and scored based on their degree of contradiction. Pairs with higher inconsistency scores were prioritised for annotation, and the resulting labeled data was fed back to the model through fine-tuning or few-shot learning.

Analysis. The proposed method was evaluated on multiple datasets, including Japanese and English data. Its performance was compared against existing baseline methods, such as uncertainty sampling and random sampling, using the pairwise F1 score as the primary evaluation metric.

Results. The experiments revealed that the proposed inconsistency-driven sampling strategy outperformed or achieved comparable performance to existing methods across all datasets.

Conclusion. By leveraging inconsistency to actively select training data, our approach achieves learning efficiency, demonstrating improved entity matching performance under the same annotation budget.

References

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Published

2026-03-20

How to Cite

Okayama, K., Ito, H., & Morishima, A. (2026). Learning from unknown-unknowns: inconsistency-driven sampling for improving LLM entity matching. Information Research an International Electronic Journal, 31(iConf), 118–135. https://doi.org/10.47989/ir31iConf64127

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Conference proceedings

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