Improved name retrieval may have little effect on company clusters when the pair classifier remains unchanged. We examine this dependency by adapting multilingual E5 encoders under fixed candidate budgets and downstream decision rules. Random-negative and hard-negative training use identical positive schedules. Checkpoints are selected before collecting a new GLEIF sample of 3,633 names, 2,880 source identities and 882 silver-positive pairs. At 72,660 candidate edges, adaptation with a multi-view selector increases direct pair recall from 53.74% to 76.98%. The primary matcher adds only seven correct and two incorrect co-cluster pairs: cluster recall rises from 32.54% to 33.33%, while precision falls from 95.99% to 95.45%. Of 208 newly retrieved silver-positive pairs, 202 fall below its decision threshold. Random-negative and hard-negative training produce identical final partitions. An AI-assisted, single-reviewer audit of 137 pairs supports the observed pattern, although its predominantly LEI-derived evidence does not establish independent gold labels. The results locate the immediate loss of retrieval gains at the existing confirmation stage and show why encoder evaluation must also measure final cluster quality.
Privacy redaction must remove personal information while preserving relationships expressed in text. We develop a multilingual named-entity tagger with fine-grained distinctions supporting varied redaction policies and methods for cheaply learning additional distinctions. We fine-tune a multilingual encoder with an affine span-tagging head on frontier-model annotations in 35 languages, replay mapped human gold with coverage-aware masking so unannotated types are not treated as negatives, and repair subword boundaries with a learned +/-1-character adjustment. On 1,283 human-gold test segments in seven languages, best measured redaction F1 is 88.8, against 69.1 for published GLiNER2 with 11 unrepresentable types excluded from its task (68.8 without that exemption), 67.8 for GLiNER2 adapted to the new training data, 57.3 for Microsoft Presidio and 35.8 for the best published OpenAI Privacy Filter fine-tune. Adding about 50,000 annotated training sentences and increasing human-gold replay improves exact typed-span F1 from 74.5 to 76.3 on Ont3, our 31-type frontier-annotated NER evaluation of 1,201 development segments. Mapped-gold replay alone raises human-gold F1 by ten points without loss on frontier-annotated text; boundary adjustment adds 1.7 exact typed-span F1 points on Ont3. Local LLMs fitting on a single 96-GB GPU underperformed as prompted annotators and frozen encoders, with encoding 30-95 times slower than XLM-R inference and prompted annotation roughly 180-1,100 times slower in the evaluated configurations. The encoder architecture delivers 4.9 times GLiNER2's CPU throughput. We release code, prompts and training recipes, with data-acquisition scripts and source links.
Entity Alignment (EA) is essential for knowledge graph (KG) fusion, but existing benchmarks often allow models to exploit name overlap rather than relational structure. This makes it difficult to evaluate whether models can reject same-name entities that refer to different real-world objects. Our primary contribution is a same-name hard-negative augmentation strategy that simultaneously yields quality-controlled evaluation benchmarks (DW-HN29K, DY-HN27K) and augmented training corpora (DW-Train, DY-Train), by mining same-name but distinct entity pairs from KG name-collision groups. We further introduce HELEA, a two-stage framework integrating (i) entity encoder retrieval trained on hard-negative-augmented training corpora with 1-hop KG context, and (ii) LLM-based reranking without additional training. Experiments show that name-dependent baselines collapse to near-random performance on our hard-negative benchmarks, while HELEA achieves F1 0.967 on DW-HN29K while maintaining Hit@1 0.993 on standard DW-15K.
We built and evaluated a self-serve entity resolution (ER) system on six benchmarks spanning 864 to 5M records, and three lessons emerged that are absent from existing ER literature. (1) No single matching algorithm wins everywhere - a self-serve pipeline cannot predict its next dataset, so we recommend training several algorithm families per dataset and letting an automatic bake-off pick the winner. (2) Precision and recall need separate fixes, not a shared threshold - precision needs hard rule-based vetoes, recall needs more diverse candidate retrieval. (3) One false-positive link can silently merge unrelated entities - assuming "A matches B" and "B matches C" implies "A matches C" lets a single bad link chain hundreds of records together, so every cross-group merge must be actively re-verified. We hope these lessons save practitioners the months of dead-end experiments that led us to them.