The actual problem I described above (bulk de-duplication of records without any direct clues, such as unique ids, to decide whether two records are duplicates)

The actual problem I described above (bulk de-duplication of records without any direct clues, such as unique ids, to decide whether two records are duplicates) falls under this category. The first paper I provided is a survey of commonly used methods in this space, it's the exact opposite of a lot of formulas without the context.