Scalable Similarity Joins of Tokenized Strings

Abstract: This work tackles the problem of fuzzy joining of strings that naturally tokenize into meaningful substrings, e.g., full names. Tokenized-string joins have several established applications in the context of data integration and cleaning. This work is primarily motivated by fraud detection, where attackers slightly modify tokenized strings, e.g., names on accounts, to create numerous identities that she can use to defraud service providers, e.g., Google, and LinkedIn. To detect such attacks, all the accounts are pair-wise compared, and the resulting similar accounts are considered suspicious and are further investigated. Comparing the tokenized-string features of a large number of accounts requires an intuitive tokenized-string distance that can detect subtle edits introduced by an adversary, and a very scalable algorithm. This is not achievable by existing distance measure that are unintuitive, hard to tune, and whose join algorithms are serial and hence unscalable. We define a novel intuitive distance measure between tokenized strings, Normalized Setwise Levenshtein Distance (NSLD). To the best of our knowledge, NSLD is the first metric proposed for comparing tokenized strings. We propose a scalable distributed framework, Tokenized-String Joiner (TSJ), that adopts existing scalable string-join algorithms as building blocks to perform NSLD-joins. We carefully engineer optimizations and approximations that dramatically improve the efficiency of TSJ. The effectiveness of the TSJ framework is evident from the evaluation conducted on tens of millions of tokenized-string names from Google accounts. The superiority of the tokenized-string-specific TSJ framework over the general-purpose metric-spaces joining algorithms has been established.