# DCoM: A Deep Column Mapper for Semantic Data Type Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.12871 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12871/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [Sherlock: A Deep Learning Approach to Semantic Data Type Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10688/) (2019)
- [VizNet: Towards A Large-Scale Visualization Learning and Benchmarking Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04616/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Detection of semantic data types is a very crucial task in data science for automated data cleaning, schema matching, data discovery, semantic data type normalization and sensitive data identification. Existing methods include regular expression-based or dictionary lookup-based methods that are not robust to dirty as well unseen data and are limited to a very less number of semantic data types to predict. Existing Machine Learning methods extract large number of engineered features from data and build logistic regression, random forest or feedforward neural network for this purpose. In this paper, we introduce DCoM, a collection of multi-input NLP-based deep neural networks to detect semantic data types where instead of extracting large number of features from the data, we feed the raw values of columns (or instances) to the model as texts. We train DCoM on 686,765 data columns extracted from VizNet corpus with 78 different semantic data types. DCoM outperforms other contemporary results with a quite significant margin on the same dataset.