# LEMON: Explainable Entity Matching

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.00516 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00516/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [Learning Important Features Through Propagating Activation Differences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02685/) (2017)
- [Counterfactual Explanations without Opening the Black Box: Automated Decisions and the GDPR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00399/) (2017)
- [A Survey Of Methods For Explaining Black Box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01933/) (2018)
- [Explaining Explanations: An Overview of Interpretability of Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00069/) (2018)
- [Techniques for Interpretable Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00033/) (2018)
- [Deep Entity Matching with Pre-Trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00584/) (2020)
- [DeepER -- Deep Entity Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.00597/) (2017)
- [Neural Networks for Entity Matching: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11075/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Through the Fairness Lens: Experimental Analysis and Evaluation of Entity Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02726/) (2023)
- [xEM: Explainable Entity Matching in Customer 360](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00342/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

State-of-the-art entity matching (EM) methods are hard to interpret, and there is significant value in bringing explainable AI to EM. Unfortunately, most popular explainability methods do not work well out of the box for EM and need adaptation. In this paper, we identify three challenges of applying local post hoc feature attribution methods to entity matching: cross-record interaction effects, non-match explanations, and variation in sensitivity. We propose our novel model-agnostic and schema-flexible method LEMON that addresses all three challenges by (i) producing dual explanations to avoid cross-record interaction effects, (ii) introducing the novel concept of attribution potential to explain how two records could have matched, and (iii) automatically choosing explanation granularity to match the sensitivity of the matcher and record pair in question. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is more faithful to the matcher and does a better job of helping users understand the decision boundary of the matcher than previous work. Furthermore, user studies show that the rate at which human subjects can construct counterfactual examples after seeing an explanation from our proposed method increases from 54% to 64% for matches and from 15% to 49% for non-matches compared to explanations from a standard adaptation of LIME.