Structure-Guided Entity Resolution: Fine-Tuning LLMs for Robust Name Matching in Complex Linguistic Contexts

Shivam Chourasia, Hitesh Kapoor, Nilesh Patil


Abstract
Matching person names across heterogeneous records is a core challenge in entity resolution, especially within linguistically and culturally complex environments. Variations in naming conventions, inconsistent transliteration across scripts, and frequent data entry errors make it difficult to unify user identities, an essential requirement for Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance. While Large Language Models have shown promise in understanding natural language, they often struggle with the structured ambiguity present in such domain-specific settings. This paper introduces Structure-Guided Entity Resolution (SGER), a novel framework that fine-tunes an LLM through a two-phase curriculum. The model is first trained to parse the grammatical and semantic structure of personal names, then optimized for the downstream task of binary entity matching. We evaluate SGER in the challenging context of Indian identity data, one of the most linguistically diverse and noisy environments globally. SGER achieves 99.02% accuracy and an F1 of 0.994 on a held-out set of 50,000 real-world pairs, outperforming GPT-4o few-shot prompting and single-stage fine-tuning baselines. The system is fully deployed in production at Dream11, the world’s largest fantasy sports platform, serving 250M+ users. Our results demonstrate that curriculum-guided training enables robust, high-precision entity resolution in real-world multilingual systems at scale.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-industry.101
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, USA
Editors:
Yunyao Li, Georg Rehm, Mei Tu
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1461–1468
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-industry.101/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shivam Chourasia, Hitesh Kapoor, and Nilesh Patil. 2026. Structure-Guided Entity Resolution: Fine-Tuning LLMs for Robust Name Matching in Complex Linguistic Contexts. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), pages 1461–1468, San Diego, California, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Structure-Guided Entity Resolution: Fine-Tuning LLMs for Robust Name Matching in Complex Linguistic Contexts (Chourasia et al., ACL 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-industry.101.pdf