Lightweight matching improves the match performance by utilizing an extremely fast score estimate. It rejects candidates that contain obvious mismatches instead of passing them to full scoring. On a typical system, it rejects greater than 99% of the candidates, which results in improved performance.

SSA-NAME3 rejects the candidates based on the lightweight matching score. It is possible for SSA-NAME3 to reject the candidates that might have matched high with the SSA-NAME3 scoring. You can mitigate this risk by carefully selecting the fields to which you apply lightweight matching and by using threshold tuning.

Lightweight matching is useful when you apply it to the fields that have low variations such as addresses. Lightweight matching is not efficient for the fields with high variations, where SSA-NAME3 handles the variations through Edit-lists. For example, Bill is a poor match for William. However, you can apply lightweight matching to the high-variation fields in conjunction with other fields.

Use the LWM_FIELDS control to apply lightweight matching to the fields. Use the LWM_LIMIT control to set the reject and accept limits for the lightweight matching score.