Unicode Normalization Gaps Can Silently Break Entity Resolution Matching

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A developer building a multilingual entity resolution service discovered that missing candidate pairs—not bad match scores—were undermining accuracy in Japanese and Korean corporate data. Full-width ASCII characters used by Japanese securities exchanges hash to different blocking keys than standard ASCII, causing matched pairs to go undetected until a manual audit was run. Korean corporate registries presented a separate issue: precomposed Unicode symbols like ㈜ (U+3378) were not caught by stripping patterns designed for multi-character equivalents. Applying Unicode NFKC normalization resolved the full-width ASCII problem but did not decompose precomposed legal-form symbols, which required explicit pattern entries. A further unresolved challenge involves traditional Japanese character variants, such as 國 versus 国, which NFKC handles inconsistently and currently require manual lookup-table additions.

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