Leveraging Large Language Models for Fuzzy String Matching in Political Science

Fuzzy string matching remains a key issue when political scientists combine data from different sources. Existing matching methods invariably rely on string distances, such as Levenshtein distance and cosine similarity. As such, they are inherently incapable of matching strings that refer to the same entity with different names such as ''JP Morgan'' and ''Chase Bank'', ''DPRK'' and ''North Korea'', ''Chuck Fleischmann (R)'' and ''Charles Fleischmann (R)''. In this letter, we propose to use large language models to entirely sidestep this problem in an easy and intuitive manner. Extensive experiments show that our proposed methods can improve the state of the art by as much as 39% in terms of average precision while being substantially easier and more intuitive to use by political scientists. Moreover, our results are robust against various temperatures. We further note that enhanced prompting can lead to additional performance improvements.