Thomas Gschwind

Thomas Gschwind, Shramona Chakraborty, Nitin Gupta et al.

ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tools such as IBM DataStage allow users to visually assemble complex data workflows, but configuring stages and their properties remains time consuming and requires deep tool knowledge. We propose a system that translates natural language descriptions into executable workflows, automatically predicting both the structure and detailed configuration of the flow. At its core lies a Classifier-Augmented Generation (CAG) approach that combines utterance decomposition with a classifier and stage-specific few-shot prompting to produce accurate stage predictions. These stages are then connected into non-linear workflows using edge prediction, and stage properties are inferred from sub-utterance context. We compare CAG against strong single-prompt and agentic baselines, showing improved accuracy and efficiency, while substantially reducing token usage. Our architecture is modular, interpretable, and capable of end-to-end workflow generation, including robust validation steps. To our knowledge, this is the first system with a detailed evaluation across stage prediction, edge layout, and property generation for natural-language-driven ETL authoring.

Nasrullah Sheikh, Xiao Qin, Berthold Reinwald et al.

Knowledge graph embedding methods learn embeddings of entities and relations in a low dimensional space which can be used for various downstream machine learning tasks such as link prediction and entity matching. Various graph convolutional network methods have been proposed which use different types of information to learn the features of entities and relations. However, these methods assign the same weight (importance) to the neighbors when aggregating the information, ignoring the role of different relations with the neighboring entities. To this end, we propose a relation-aware graph attention model that leverages relation information to compute different weights to the neighboring nodes for learning embeddings of entities and relations. We evaluate our proposed approach on link prediction and entity matching tasks. Our experimental results on link prediction on three datasets (one proprietary and two public) and results on unsupervised entity matching on one proprietary dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the relation-aware attention.

Thomas Gschwind, Christoph Miksovic, Julian Minder et al.

Record linkage is an essential part of nearly all real-world systems that consume structured and unstructured data coming from different sources. Typically no common key is available for connecting records. Massive data cleaning and data integration processes often have to be completed before any data analytics and further processing can be performed. Although record linkage is frequently regarded as a somewhat tedious but necessary step, it reveals valuable insights into the data at hand. These insights guide further analytic approaches to the data and support data visualization. In this work we focus on company entity matching, where company name, location and industry are taken into account. Our contribution is an end-to-end, highly scalable, enterprise-grade system that uses rule-based linkage algorithms extended with a machine learning approach to account for short company names. Linkage time is greatly reduced by efficient decomposition of the search space using MinHash. High linkage accuracy is achieved by the proposed thorough scoring process of the matching candidates. Based on real-world ground truth datasets, we show that our approach reaches a recall of 91% compared to 73% for baseline approaches. These results are achieved while scaling linearly with the number of nodes used in the system.