Constraint-Guided Enterprise Data Mapping with Large Language Models
Enterprise entity alignment must handle semi-structured records, implicit attributes, and unit or granularity mismatches. Manual matching is still common in practice, but does not scale as schemas and providers evolve. LLM-only matching improves semantic recall, yet can violate structural and physical invariants, producing fluent yet operationally invalid correspondences. We propose constraint-guided mapping (CGM), a neuro-symbolic method with three stages: (i) schema-grounded admissibility constraints with metadata mc = , where tau_c denotes the constraint type and delta_c provides executable relation and normalization logic; (ii) constraint-restricted candidate generation with cascade relaxation to guarantee a nonempty feasible set under noise; and (iii) neural ranking with bounded LLM disambiguation restricted to that feasible set. Methodologically, constraints operate as hypothesis-space operators rather than post-hoc validators, enabling controlled degradation under relaxation and auditable, human-guidable decisions. On a controlled structural-decoy benchmark, hard admissibility shrinks the candidate space by ~480x without dropping the GT, and a layer-by-layer ablation shows this gate, not the LLM, is the decisive lift (F1 0.08 to 0.66). The benefit is model-independent and adds no extra inference cost: a small model with constraints matches a frontier LLM used without them at ~28x lower cost. The method, not a single tuned configuration, transfers across seven enterprise makes (macro F1 0.70), each under its own automatically discovered, expert-refinable constraints, and lowers expert effort by ~7x versus spreadsheet workflows. Public Valentine results add an external ranking sanity check and mark the boundary: constraints should be hard only where structural invariants are match-determining.