Group, Embed and Reason: A Hybrid LLM and Embedding Framework for Semantic Attribute Alignment

AbstractIn enterprise systems, tasks like API integration, ETL pipeline creation, customer record merging, and data consolidation rely on accurately aligning attributes that refer to the same real-world concept but differ across schemas. This semantic attribute alignment is critical for enabling schema unification, reporting, and analytics. The challenge is amplified in schema only settings where no instance data is available due to ambiguous names, inconsistent descriptions, and varied naming conventions.We propose a hybrid, unsupervised framework that combines the contextual reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs) with the stability of embedding-based similarity and schema grouping to address token limitations and hallucinations. Our method operates solely on metadata and scales to large schemas by grouping attributes and refining LLM outputs through embedding-based enhancement, justification filtering, and ranking. Experiments on real-world healthcare schemas show strong performance, highlighting the effectiveness of the framework in privacy-constrained scenarios.