Jradeh C. K. auteur aut IRD Raoufi E. auteur aut IRD David J. auteur aut IRD Larmande Pierre auteur aut IRD Scharffe F. auteur aut IRD Todorov K. auteur aut IRD Trojahn C. auteur aut IRD text journalArticle eng text/pdf reformatted digital access Entity Matching (EM) automates the discovery of identity links between entities within different Knowledge Graphs (KGs). Link keys are crucial for EM, serving as rules allowing to identify identity links across different KGs, possibly described using different ontologies. However, the approach for extracting link keys struggles to scale on large KGs. While embedding-based EM methods efficiently handle large KGs they lack explainability. This paper proposes a novel hybrid EM approach to guarantee the scalability link key extraction approach and improve the explainability of embeddingbased EM methods. First, embedding-based EM approaches are used to sample the KGs based on the identity links they generate, thereby reducing the search space to relevant sub-graphs for link key extraction. Second, rules (in the form of link keys) are extracted to explain the generation of identity links by the embedding-based methods. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach allows link key extraction to scale on large KGs, preserving the quality of the extracted link keys. Additionally, it shows that link keys can improve the explainability of the identity links generated by embedding-methods, allowing for the regeneration of 77% of the identity links produced for a specific EM task, thereby providing an approximation of the reasons behind their generation. specialized Entity matching Knowledge graphs Link keys Embedding-based EM Symbolic EM Graph embeddings Language models Hybrid AI 020 122 3344-3353 2025 https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010094312 10.1145/3696410.3714581 [F B010094312] https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010094312 https://horizon.documentation.ird.fr/exl-doc/pleins_textes/2025-08/010094312.pdf IRD - Base Horizon / Pleins textes 2025-08-27 2026-06-12 fdi:010094312 fre