A critical task in data cleaning and integration is the identification of duplicate records representing the same real-world entity. A popular approach to duplicate identification employs similarity join to find pairs of similar records followed by a clustering algorithm to group together records that refer to the same entity. However, the clustering algorithm is strictly used as a post-processing step, which slows down the overall performance and only produces results at the end of the whole process. In this paper, we propose SjClust, a framework to integrate similarity join and clustering into a single operation. Our approach allows to smoothly accommodating a variety of cluster representation and merging strategies into set similarity join algorithms, while fully leveraging state-of-the-art optimization techniques.
