Leveraging Pretrained Language Models for Enhanced Entity Matching: A Comprehensive Study of Fine-Tuning and Prompt Learning Paradigms

Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) acquire rich prior semantic knowledge during the pretraining phase and utilize it to enhance downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Entity Matching (EM), a fundamental NLP task, aims to determine whether two entity records from different knowledge bases refer to the same real-world entity. This study, for the first time, explores the potential of using a PLM to boost the EM task through two transfer learning techniques, namely, fine-tuning and prompt learning. Our work also represents the first application of the soft prompt in an EM task. Experimental results across eleven EM datasets show that the soft prompt consistently outperforms other methods in terms of F1 scores across all datasets. Additionally, this study also investigates the capability of prompt learning in few-shot learning and observes that the hard prompt achieves the highest F1 scores in both zero-shot and one-shot context. These findings underscore the effectiveness of prompt learning paradigms in tackling challenging EM tasks.