Microsoft patents method to match data records using tokens and web searches

1. A computer-implemented method performed by a computing system comprising one or more processors, memory, a partition component, a tokenization component, a vector generator, a threshold component, and a weighting component, the method comprising: obtaining, by the computing system, a plurality of records from different data sources, each record including an item identifier that identifies an item that is described by the record and an attribute that relates to the item; partitioning, by the partition component, the plurality of records into a plurality of record blocks based on partition criteria including at least attribute similarity; for each record block, processing, by the tokenization component, attribute data of each record to generate normalized entity tokens corresponding to the attributes of the record; selecting, within a record block, a first record and a second record; generating, by the vector generator, a similarity vector comprising a plurality of attribute-level similarity scores based on the entity tokens of the first and second records, wherein the similarity vector comprises attribute-level similarity scores generated across a plurality of attributes of the records; determining, by a threshold component, whether a similarity measure derived from the similarity vector satisfies a threshold value; responsive to the similarity measure not satisfying the threshold value: applying, by the weighting component, machine-learned attribute weights to generate a weighted similarity measure; and determining the match result based on at least one of the similarity measure or the weighted similarity measure; responsive to the match result indicating that the first and second records do not describe the same item; transmitting, by the computing system, at least one of the entity tokens generated from the normalized representation of at least one of the first and second records of a particular record block to a search engine as a search input; receiving search results; incorporating the search results into the particular record block from which the entity tokens were generated; repeating the generating of the similarity vector, determining whether the similarity measure satisfies the threshold value, and determining the match result using the particular record block including the incorporated search results to determine an updated match result based on the incorporated search results; and determining, by the computing system, whether the first and second records correspond to a same entity based on the updated match result.