arXiv subjects

Gregory Goren

Publications and source records attributed to Gregory Goren.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Understanding Domain-Aware Distribution Alignment in Budgeted Entity Matching

Entity Matching (EM) is a core operation in the data integration pipeline, where records from different sources are compared to determine whether they refer to the same real-world entity. Recent work has incorporated domain information and low-resource learning techniques to better adapt EM systems to realistic settings. While these approaches have demonstrated strong performance, it remains unclear how they behave under varying data constraints and levels of supervision in practice. In this paper, we investigate a state-of-the-art method for low-resource, domain-aware EM--BEACON--and study how its performance is affected by different algorithmic choices and data availability conditions. We conduct a series of targeted experiments to evaluate these variations, providing deeper insight into the role of distribution alignment and the behavior of the BEACON framework.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2026

BEACON: Budget-Aware Entity Matching Across Domains (Extended Technical Report)

Entity Matching (EM)--the task of determining whether two data records refer to the same real-world entity--is a core task in data integration. Recent advances in deep learning have set a new standard for EM, particularly through fine-tuning Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) and, more recently, Large Language Models (LLMs). However, fine-tuning typically requires large amounts of labeled data, which are expensive and time-consuming to obtain. In the context of e-commerce matching, labeling scarcity varies widely across domains, raising the question of how to intelligently train accurate domain-specific EM models with limited labeled data. In this work we assume users have only a limited amount of labels for a specific target domain but have access to labeled data from other domains. We introduce BEACON, a distribution-aware, budget-aware framework for low-resource EM across domains. BEACON leverages the insight that embedding representations of pairwise candidate matches can guide the effective selection of out-of-domain samples under limited in-domain supervision. We conduct extensive experiments across multiple domain-partitioned datasets derived from established EM benchmarks, demonstrating that BEACON consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods under different training budgets.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2021

Driving the Herd: Search Engines as Content Influencers

In competitive search settings such as the Web, many documents' authors (publishers) opt to have their documents highly ranked for some queries. To this end, they modify the documents - specifically, their content - in response to induced rankings. Thus, the search engine affects the content in the corpus via its ranking decisions. We present a first study of the ability of search engines to drive pre-defined, targeted, content effects in the corpus using simple techniques. The first is based on the herding phenomenon - a celebrated result from the economics literature - and the second is based on biasing the relevance ranking function. The types of content effects we study are either topical or touch on specific document properties - length and inclusion of query terms. Analysis of ranking competitions we organized between incentivized publishers shows that the types of content effects we target can indeed be attained by applying our suggested techniques. These findings have important implications with regard to the role of search engines in shaping the corpus.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2021

OSOUM Framework for Trading Data Research

In the last decades, data have become a cornerstone component in many business decisions, and copious resources are being poured into production and acquisition of the high-quality data. This emerging market possesses unique features, and thus came under the spotlight for the stakeholders and researchers alike. In this work, we aspire to provide the community with a set of tools for making business decisions, as well as analysis of markets behaving according to certain rules. We supply, to the best of our knowledge, the first open source simulation platform, termed Open SOUrce Market Simulator (OSOUM) to analyze trading markets and specifically data markets. We also describe and implement a specific data market model, consisting of two types of agents: sellers who own various datasets available for acquisition, and buyers searching for relevant and beneficial datasets for purchase. The current simulation treats data as an infinite supply product. Yet, other market settings may be easily implemented using OSOUM. Although commercial frameworks, intended for handling data markets, already exist, we provide a free and extensive end-to-end research tool for simulating possible behavior for both buyers and sellers participating in (data) markets.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2020

Ranking-Incentivized Quality Preserving Content Modification

The Web is a canonical example of a competitive retrieval setting where many documents' authors consistently modify their documents to promote them in rankings. We present an automatic method for quality-preserving modification of document content -- i.e., maintaining content quality -- so that the document is ranked higher for a query by a non-disclosed ranking function whose rankings can be observed. The method replaces a passage in the document with some other passage. To select the two passages, we use a learning-to-rank approach with a bi-objective optimization criterion: rank promotion and content-quality maintenance. We used the approach as a bot in content-based ranking competitions. Analysis of the competitions demonstrates the merits of our approach with respect to human content modifications in terms of rank promotion, content-quality maintenance and relevance.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2018

From Recommendation Systems to Facility Location Games

Recommendation systems are extremely popular tools for matching users and contents. However, when content providers are strategic, the basic principle of matching users to the closest content, where both users and contents are modeled as points in some semantic space, may yield low social welfare. This is due to the fact that content providers are strategic and optimize their offered content to be recommended to as many users as possible. Motivated by modern applications, we propose the widely studied framework of facility location games to study recommendation systems with strategic content providers. Our conceptual contribution is the introduction of a $\textit{mediator}$ to facility location models, in the pursuit of better social welfare. We aim at designing mediators that a) induce a game with high social welfare in equilibrium, and b) intervene as little as possible. In service of the latter, we introduce the notion of $\textit{intervention cost}$, which quantifies how much damage a mediator may cause to the social welfare when an off-equilibrium profile is adopted. As a case study in high-welfare low-intervention mediator design, we consider the one-dimensional segment as the user domain. We propose a mediator that implements the socially optimal strategy profile as the unique equilibrium profile, and show a tight bound on its intervention cost. Ultimately, we consider some extensions, and highlight open questions for the general agenda.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2018

Ranking Robustness Under Adversarial Document Manipulations

For many queries in the Web retrieval setting there is an on-going ranking competition: authors manipulate their documents so as to promote them in rankings. Such competitions can have unwarranted effects not only in terms of retrieval effectiveness, but also in terms of ranking robustness. A case in point, rankings can (rapidly) change due to small indiscernible perturbations of documents. While there has been a recent growing interest in analyzing the robustness of classifiers to adversarial manipulations, there has not yet been a study of the robustness of relevance-ranking functions. We address this challenge by formally analyzing different definitions and aspects of the robustness of learning-to-rank-based ranking functions. For example, we formally show that increased regularization of linear ranking functions increases ranking robustness. This finding leads us to conjecture that decreased variance of any ranking function results in increased robustness. We propose several measures for quantifying ranking robustness and use them to analyze ranking competitions between documents' authors. The empirical findings support our formal analysis and conjecture for both RankSVM and LambdaMART.

cs.IR↗