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Improving Address Matching Using Siamese Transformer Networks

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Progress in Artificial Intelligence (EPIA 2023)

Abstract

Matching addresses is a critical task for companies and post offices involved in the processing and delivery of packages. The ramifications of incorrectly delivering a package to the wrong recipient are numerous, ranging from harm to the company’s reputation to economic and environmental costs. This research introduces a deep learning-based model designed to increase the efficiency of address matching for Portuguese addresses. The model comprises two parts: (i) a bi-encoder, which is fine-tuned to create meaningful embeddings of Portuguese postal addresses, utilized to retrieve the top 10 likely matches of the un-normalized target address from a normalized database, and (ii) a cross-encoder, which is fine-tuned to accurately re-rank the 10 addresses obtained by the bi-encoder. The model has been tested on a real-case scenario of Portuguese addresses and exhibits a high degree of accuracy, exceeding 95% at the door level. When utilized with GPU computations, the inference speed is about 4.5 times quicker than other traditional approaches such as BM25. An implementation of this system in a real-world scenario would substantially increase the effectiveness of the distribution process. Such an implementation is currently under investigation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Code available at: https://github.com/avduarte333/adress-matching.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/seatgeek/fuzzywuzzy.

  4. 4.

    Although the model under study is the BM25+CE, when evaluating the retrieval capabilities, the cross-encoder is not used, therefore, for notation simplicity, the model is mentioned as BM25.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the support of Dr. Egídio Moutinho, Dra. Marília Rosado, Dr. Rúben Rocha, Dr. André Esteves, Dr. Paulo Silva, Dr. Gonçalo Ribeiro Enes and Dr. Diogo Freitas Oliveira in the development of this project. We also gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by Recovery and Resilience Fund towards the Center for Responsible AI project (Ref. C628696807-00454142) and the multiannual financing of the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) for INESC-ID (Ref. UIDB/50021/2020).

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Correspondence to André V. Duarte .

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Duarte, A.V., Oliveira, A.L. (2023). Improving Address Matching Using Siamese Transformer Networks. In: Moniz, N., Vale, Z., Cascalho, J., Silva, C., Sebastião, R. (eds) Progress in Artificial Intelligence. EPIA 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14116. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49011-8_33

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49011-8_33

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