Recall@k
The definition as the field writes it comes first, weaknesses and all. What Entity Bind does about it comes last, in its own paragraph, so you can take one without the other. Filed under measurement.
How you tell whether any of it worked, and which numbers may not be quoted without which other numbers.
every figure, with its population →What recall@k means
Recall@k asks one question: was the right answer anywhere in the shortlist of length k. Not whether it was ranked first, and not whether the matcher subsequently chose it. Retrieval is scored separately from matching because it fails differently, and values at several k are usually reported together: recall@1 measures ranking, recall@50 measures whether the candidate generator is losing anything at all.
The metric is a ceiling rather than a score. If recall@k is 0.90, then ten per cent of records cannot be resolved correctly no matter how good the scorer, the adjudicator or the research stage is, and any end-to-end accuracy figure is being computed on the ninety per cent that survived retrieval.
The subtlety that makes recall@k dangerous to quote is that it is a property of the list, not of the winner. A high recall@5 says the answer is in there somewhere; it says nothing about whether the top row is right, and no row of a shortlist may be offered as a match on the strength of it.
On the gated acquisition fixture, over 205 name-only records on the gated acquisition fixture. Entity Bind's correct entity was ranked first for 74% (151/205) and present in the top three for 100% (205/205). Recall is a property of the list, not of the winner. 74% is far below the 0.90 acceptance floor, so no row of that shortlist may be offered as a match, quoted as an accuracy number, or folded into an accepted-match count. The stub-adjudicated run behind the pairwise gate, not the 317-company live recording behind the tier table.
Where this shows up in Entity Bind
Three pages where this term stops being vocabulary and starts changing an answer, a payload or a price.
- How to measure entity resolution accuracyThere is no single accuracy number for an entity resolution system, and any vendor quoting one is quoting a property of their fixture rather than of their engine.Open
- The accuracy methodEvery published rate with the population it was measured over, its interval and its fixture — including the input shapes that fail.Open
- The API referenceThe REST surface: payloads, the decision outcomes, the error model, the usage block and the ceiling on the confidence field.Open
The fastest way past a definition is a file: which of your rows are the same company, which of your existing matches we would not have made, and what we could not decide.
Start freeThe terms next to this one
Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one.
Candidate generation
Candidate generation is the retrieval step that proposes the small set of entities a record might be, and its recall is the hard ceiling on everything the rest of the pipeline can achieve.
Blocking
Blocking is the technique that makes entity resolution affordable by comparing each record only against a small set of plausible candidates instead of against every other record.
Recall
Recall is the share of the true matches present in the data that a system actually found, and it is the metric that abstention costs you.
Abstention
An abstention is a first-class 'we do not know' returned instead of a match: the record comes back unresolved, with a ranked shortlist, a typed reason and the column that would have decided it.
Confidence floor
A confidence floor is the score below which a system refuses to return a match at all, expressed as an acceptance contract rather than as a promise about accuracy.
The other 13 terms on this shelf
How you tell whether any of it worked, and which numbers may not be quoted without which other numbers.
Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy.
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