DistillER: Knowledge Distillation in Entity Resolution with Large Language Models

Abstract: Recent advances in Entity Resolution (ER) have leveraged LLMs, achieving strong performance but at the cost of substantial computational resources or high financial overhead. Existing LLM-based ER approaches operate either in unsupervised settings and rely on very large and costly models, or in supervised settings and require ground-truth annotations, leaving a critical gap between time efficiency and effectiveness. To make LLM-powered ER more practical, we investigate Knowledge Distillation (KD) as a means to transfer knowledge from large, effective models (Teachers) to smaller, more efficient models (Students) without requiring gold labels. We introduce DistillER, the first framework that systematically bridges this gap across three dimensions: (i) Data Selection, where we study strategies for identifying informative subsets of data; (ii) Knowledge Elicitation, where we compare single- and multi-teacher settings across LLMs and smaller LLMs (SLMs); and (iii) Distillation Algorithms, where we evaluate supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning approaches. Our experiments reveal that supervised fine-tuning of Students on noisy labels generated by LLM Teachers consistently outperforms alternative KD strategies, while also enabling high-quality explanation generation. Finally, we benchmark DistillER against established supervised and unsupervised ER methods based on LLMs and SLMs, demonstrating significant improvements in both effectiveness and efficiency.