Text Data Integration
Md Ataur Rahman, Dimitris Sacharidis, Oscar Romero, Sergi Nadal · Mar 28, 2026 · Citations: 0
How to use this page
Low trustUse this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.
Best use
Background context only
What to verify
Read the full paper before copying any benchmark, metric, or protocol choices.
Evidence quality
Low
Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.
Abstract
Data comes in many forms. From a shallow perspective, they can be viewed as being either in structured (e.g., as a relation, as key-value pairs) or unstructured (e.g., text, image) formats. So far, machines have been fairly good at processing and reasoning over structured data that follows a precise schema. However, the heterogeneity of data poses a significant challenge on how well diverse categories of data can be meaningfully stored and processed. Data Integration, a crucial part of the data engineering pipeline, addresses this by combining disparate data sources and providing unified data access to end-users. Until now, most data integration systems have leaned on only combining structured data sources. Nevertheless, unstructured data (a.k.a. free text) also contains a plethora of knowledge waiting to be utilized. Thus, in this chapter, we firstly make the case for the integration of textual data, to later present its challenges, state of the art and open problems.