  Finding joinable tables in data lakes is key procedure in many applications
such as data integration, data augmentation, data analysis, and data market.
Traditional approaches that find equi-joinable tables are unable to deal with
misspellings and different formats, nor do they capture any semantic joins. In
this paper, we propose PEXESO, a framework for joinable table discovery in data
lakes. We embed textual values as high-dimensional vectors and join columns
under similarity predicates on high-dimensional vectors, hence to address the
limitations of equi-join approaches and identify more meaningful results. To
efficiently find joinable tables with similarity, we propose a block-and-verify
method that utilizes pivot-based filtering. A partitioning technique is
developed to cope with the case when the data lake is large and the index
cannot fit in main memory. An experimental evaluation on real datasets shows
that our solution identifies substantially more tables than equi-joins and
outperforms other similarity-based options, and the join results are useful in
data enrichment for machine learning tasks. The experiments also demonstrate
the efficiency of the proposed method.
