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Accurate career path prediction can support many stakeholders, like job seekers, recruiters, HR, and project managers. However, publicly available data and tools for career path prediction are scarce. In this work, we introduce KARRIEREWEGE, a comprehensive, publicly available dataset containing over 500k career paths, significantly surpassing the size of previously available datasets. We link the dataset to the ESCO taxonomy to offer a valuable resource for predicting career trajectories. To tackle the problem of free-text inputs typically found in resumes, we enhance it by synthesizing job titles and descriptions resulting in KARRIEREWEGE+. This allows for accurate predictions from unstructured data, closely aligning with real-world application challenges. We benchmark existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models on our dataset and a prior benchmark and observe improved performance and robustness, particularly for free-text use cases, due to the synthesized data., Comment: Accepted at COLING Industry Track

We present SnakModel, a Danish large language model (LLM) based on Llama2-7B, which we continuously pre-train on 13.6B Danish words, and further tune on 3.7M Danish instructions. As best practices for creating LLMs for smaller language communities have yet to be established, we examine the effects of early modeling and training decisions on downstream performance throughout the entire training pipeline, including (1) the creation of a strictly curated corpus of Danish text from diverse sources; (2) the language modeling and instruction-tuning training process itself, including the analysis of intermediate training dynamics, and ablations across different hyperparameters; (3) an evaluation on eight language and culturally-specific tasks. Across these experiments SnakModel achieves the highest overall performance, outperforming multiple contemporary Llama2-7B-based models. By making SnakModel, the majority of our pre-training corpus, and the associated code available under open licenses, we hope to foster further research and development in Danish Natural Language Processing, and establish training guidelines for languages with similar resource constraints., Comment: Accepted at NoDaLiDa 2025 (oral)

Language typology databases enhance multi-lingual Natural Language Processing (NLP) by improving model adaptability to diverse linguistic structures. The widely-used lang2vec toolkit integrates several such databases, but its coverage remains limited at 28.9\%. Previous work on automatically increasing coverage predicts missing values based on features from other languages or focuses on single features, we propose to use textual data for better-informed feature prediction. To this end, we introduce a multi-lingual Part-of-Speech (POS) tagger, achieving over 70\% accuracy across 1,749 languages, and experiment with external statistical features and a variety of machine learning algorithms. We also introduce a more realistic evaluation setup, focusing on likely to be missing typology features, and show that our approach outperforms previous work in both setups., Comment: 9 pages, 11 figures

Current language models require a lot of training data to obtain high performance. For Relation Classification (RC), many datasets are domain-specific, so combining datasets to obtain better performance is non-trivial. We explore a multi-domain training setup for RC, and attempt to improve performance by encoding domain information. Our proposed models improve > 2 Macro-F1 against the baseline setup, and our analysis reveals that not all the labels benefit the same: The classes which occupy a similar space across domains (i.e., their interpretation is close across them, for example "physical") benefit the least, while domain-dependent relations (e.g., "part-of'') improve the most when encoding domain information., Comment: Accepted at LREC-COLING 2024

Textual domain is a crucial property within the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community due to its effects on downstream model performance. The concept itself is, however, loosely defined and, in practice, refers to any non-typological property, such as genre, topic, medium or style of a document. We investigate the core notion of domains via human proficiency in identifying related intrinsic textual properties, specifically the concepts of genre (communicative purpose) and topic (subject matter). We publish our annotations in *TGeGUM*: A collection of 9.1k sentences from the GUM dataset (Zeldes, 2017) with single sentence and larger context (i.e., prose) annotations for one of 11 genres (source type), and its topic/subtopic as per the Dewey Decimal library classification system (Dewey, 1979), consisting of 10/100 hierarchical topics of increased granularity. Each instance is annotated by three annotators, for a total of 32.7k annotations, allowing us to examine the level of human disagreement and the relative difficulty of each annotation task. With a Fleiss' kappa of at most 0.53 on the sentence level and 0.66 at the prose level, it is evident that despite the ubiquity of domains in NLP, there is little human consensus on how to define them. By training classifiers to perform the same task, we find that this uncertainty also extends to NLP models., Comment: Accepted at LREC-COLING 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a useful technology for job matching, for both candidates and employers. Job matching is often based on a particular geographic location, such as a city or region. However, LLMs have known biases, commonly derived from their training data. In this work, we aim to quantify the metropolitan size bias encoded within large language models, evaluating zero-shot salary, employer presence, and commute duration predictions in 384 of the United States' metropolitan regions. Across all benchmarks, we observe negative correlations between the metropolitan size and the performance of the LLMS, indicating that smaller regions are indeed underrepresented. More concretely, the smallest 10 metropolitan regions show upwards of 300% worse benchmark performance than the largest 10., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, NLP4HR Workshop @ EACL 2024

Recent years have brought significant advances to Natural Language Processing (NLP), which enabled fast progress in the field of computational job market analysis. Core tasks in this application domain are skill extraction and classification from job postings. Because of its quick growth and its interdisciplinary nature, there is no exhaustive assessment of this emerging field. This survey aims to fill this gap by providing a comprehensive overview of deep learning methodologies, datasets, and terminologies specific to NLP-driven skill extraction and classification. Our comprehensive cataloging of publicly available datasets addresses the lack of consolidated information on dataset creation and characteristics. Finally, the focus on terminology addresses the current lack of consistent definitions for important concepts, such as hard and soft skills, and terms relating to skill extraction and classification., Comment: Published at NLP4HR 2024 (EACL Workshop)

Annotation tools are the starting point for creating Natural Language Processing (NLP) datasets. There is a wide variety of tools available; setting up these tools is however a hindrance. We propose EEVEE, an annotation tool focused on simplicity, efficiency, and ease of use. It can run directly in the browser (no setup required) and uses tab-separated files (as opposed to character offsets or task-specific formats) for annotation. It allows for annotation of multiple tasks on a single dataset and supports four task-types: sequence labeling, span labeling, text classification and seq2seq., Comment: 6 pages; accepted to The Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW) at EACL 2024

In Natural Language Processing, entity linking (EL) has centered around Wikipedia, but yet remains underexplored for the job market domain. Disambiguating skill mentions can help us get insight into the current labor market demands. In this work, we are the first to explore EL in this domain, specifically targeting the linkage of occupational skills to the ESCO taxonomy (le Vrang et al., 2014). Previous efforts linked coarse-grained (full) sentences to a corresponding ESCO skill. In this work, we link more fine-grained span-level mentions of skills. We tune two high-performing neural EL models, a bi-encoder (Wu et al., 2020) and an autoregressive model (Cao et al., 2021), on a synthetically generated mention--skill pair dataset and evaluate them on a human-annotated skill-linking benchmark. Our findings reveal that both models are capable of linking implicit mentions of skills to their correct taxonomy counterparts. Empirically, BLINK outperforms GENRE in strict evaluation, but GENRE performs better in loose evaluation (accuracy@$k$)., Comment: Accepted at EACL 2024 Findings

The labor market is changing rapidly, prompting increased interest in the automatic extraction of occupational skills from text. With the advent of English benchmark job description datasets, there is a need for systems that handle their diversity well. We tackle the complexity in occupational skill datasets tasks -- combining and leveraging multiple datasets for skill extraction, to identify rarely observed skills within a dataset, and overcoming the scarcity of skills across datasets. In particular, we investigate the retrieval-augmentation of language models, employing an external datastore for retrieving similar skills in a dataset-unifying manner. Our proposed method, \textbf{N}earest \textbf{N}eighbor \textbf{O}ccupational \textbf{S}kill \textbf{E}xtraction (NNOSE) effectively leverages multiple datasets by retrieving neighboring skills from other datasets in the datastore. This improves skill extraction \emph{without} additional fine-tuning. Crucially, we observe a performance gain in predicting infrequent patterns, with substantial gains of up to 30\% span-F1 in cross-dataset settings., Comment: Accepted at EACL 2024 Main

Representational spaces learned via language modeling are fundamental to Natural Language Processing (NLP), however there has been limited understanding regarding how and when during training various types of linguistic information emerge and interact. Leveraging a novel information theoretic probing suite, which enables direct comparisons of not just task performance, but their representational subspaces, we analyze nine tasks covering syntax, semantics and reasoning, across 2M pre-training steps and five seeds. We identify critical learning phases across tasks and time, during which subspaces emerge, share information, and later disentangle to specialize. Across these phases, syntactic knowledge is acquired rapidly after 0.5% of full training. Continued performance improvements primarily stem from the acquisition of open-domain knowledge, while semantics and reasoning tasks benefit from later boosts to long-range contextualization and higher specialization. Measuring cross-task similarity further reveals that linguistically related tasks share information throughout training, and do so more during the critical phase of learning than before or after. Our findings have implications for model interpretability, multi-task learning, and learning from limited data., Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 2023 (Findings)

Language understanding is a multi-faceted cognitive capability, which the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community has striven to model computationally for decades. Traditionally, facets of linguistic intelligence have been compartmentalized into tasks with specialized model architectures and corresponding evaluation protocols. With the advent of large language models (LLMs) the community has witnessed a dramatic shift towards general purpose, task-agnostic approaches powered by generative models. As a consequence, the traditional compartmentalized notion of language tasks is breaking down, followed by an increasing challenge for evaluation and analysis. At the same time, LLMs are being deployed in more real-world scenarios, including previously unforeseen zero-shot setups, increasing the need for trustworthy and reliable systems. Therefore, we argue that it is time to rethink what constitutes tasks and model evaluation in NLP, and pursue a more holistic view on language, placing trustworthiness at the center. Towards this goal, we review existing compartmentalized approaches for understanding the origins of a model's functional capacity, and provide recommendations for more multi-faceted evaluation protocols., Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 2023 (Main Conference), camera-ready

This report presents the results of the shared tasks organized as part of the VarDial Evaluation Campaign 2023. The campaign is part of the tenth workshop on Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects (VarDial), co-located with EACL 2023. Three separate shared tasks were included this year: Slot and intent detection for low-resource language varieties (SID4LR), Discriminating Between Similar Languages -- True Labels (DSL-TL), and Discriminating Between Similar Languages -- Speech (DSL-S). All three tasks were organized for the first time this year.

The increasing number of benchmarks for Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks in the computational job market domain highlights the demand for methods that can handle job-related tasks such as skill extraction, skill classification, job title classification, and de-identification. While some approaches have been developed that are specific to the job market domain, there is a lack of generalized, multilingual models and benchmarks for these tasks. In this study, we introduce a language model called ESCOXLM-R, based on XLM-R, which uses domain-adaptive pre-training on the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO) taxonomy, covering 27 languages. The pre-training objectives for ESCOXLM-R include dynamic masked language modeling and a novel additional objective for inducing multilingual taxonomical ESCO relations. We comprehensively evaluate the performance of ESCOXLM-R on 6 sequence labeling and 3 classification tasks in 4 languages and find that it achieves state-of-the-art results on 6 out of 9 datasets. Our analysis reveals that ESCOXLM-R performs better on short spans and outperforms XLM-R on entity-level and surface-level span-F1, likely due to ESCO containing short skill and occupation titles, and encoding information on the entity-level., Comment: Accepted at ACL2023 (Main)

Relation Extraction (RE) remains a challenging task, especially when considering realistic out-of-domain evaluations. One of the main reasons for this is the limited training size of current RE datasets: obtaining high-quality (manually annotated) data is extremely expensive and cannot realistically be repeated for each new domain. An intermediate training step on data from related tasks has shown to be beneficial across many NLP tasks.However, this setup still requires supplementary annotated data, which is often not available. In this paper, we investigate intermediate pre-training specifically for RE. We exploit the affinity between syntactic structure and semantic RE, and identify the syntactic relations which are closely related to RE by being on the shortest dependency path between two entities. We then take advantage of the high accuracy of current syntactic parsers in order to automatically obtain large amounts of low-cost pre-training data. By pre-training our RE model on the relevant syntactic relations, we are able to outperform the baseline in five out of six cross-domain setups, without any additional annotated data., Comment: Accepted in Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Most research in Relation Extraction (RE) involves the English language, mainly due to the lack of multi-lingual resources. We propose Multi-CrossRE, the broadest multi-lingual dataset for RE, including 26 languages in addition to English, and covering six text domains. Multi-CrossRE is a machine translated version of CrossRE (Bassignana and Plank, 2022), with a sub-portion including more than 200 sentences in seven diverse languages checked by native speakers. We run a baseline model over the 26 new datasets and--as sanity check--over the 26 back-translations to English. Results on the back-translated data are consistent with the ones on the original English CrossRE, indicating high quality of the translation and the resulting dataset., Comment: Accepted at NoDaLiDa 2023

The Wall Street Journal section of the Penn Treebank has been the de-facto standard for evaluating POS taggers for a long time, and accuracies over 97\% have been reported. However, less is known about out-of-domain tagger performance, especially with fine-grained label sets. Using data from Elder Scrolls Fandom, a wiki about the \textit{Elder Scrolls} video game universe, we create a modest dataset for qualitatively evaluating the cross-domain performance of two POS taggers: the Stanford tagger (Toutanova et al. 2003) and Bilty (Plank et al. 2016), both trained on WSJ. Our analyses show that performance on tokens seen during training is almost as good as in-domain performance, but accuracy on unknown tokens decreases from 90.37% to 78.37% (Stanford) and 87.84\% to 80.41\% (Bilty) across domains. Both taggers struggle with proper nouns and inconsistent capitalization.

Linguistic information is encoded at varying timescales (subwords, phrases, etc.) and communicative levels, such as syntax and semantics. Contextualized embeddings have analogously been found to capture these phenomena at distinctive layers and frequencies. Leveraging these findings, we develop a fully learnable frequency filter to identify spectral profiles for any given task. It enables vastly more granular analyses than prior handcrafted filters, and improves on efficiency. After demonstrating the informativeness of spectral probing over manual filters in a monolingual setting, we investigate its multilingual characteristics across seven diverse NLP tasks in six languages. Our analyses identify distinctive spectral profiles which quantify cross-task similarity in a linguistically intuitive manner, while remaining consistent across languages-highlighting their potential as robust, lightweight task descriptors., Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 2022 (Main Conference)

Aggregated data obtained from job postings provide powerful insights into labor market demands, and emerging skills, and aid job matching. However, most extraction approaches are supervised and thus need costly and time-consuming annotation. To overcome this, we propose Skill Extraction with Weak Supervision. We leverage the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations taxonomy to find similar skills in job ads via latent representations. The method shows a strong positive signal, outperforming baselines based on token-level and syntactic patterns., Comment: Accepted in RecSys in HR'22: The 2nd Workshop on Recommender Systems for Human Resources, in conjunction with the 16th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems

Making an informed choice of pre-trained language model (LM) is critical for performance, yet environmentally costly, and as such widely underexplored. The field of Computer Vision has begun to tackle encoder ranking, with promising forays into Natural Language Processing, however they lack coverage of linguistic tasks such as structured prediction. We propose probing to rank LMs, specifically for parsing dependencies in a given language, by measuring the degree to which labeled trees are recoverable from an LM's contextualized embeddings. Across 46 typologically and architecturally diverse LM-language pairs, our probing approach predicts the best LM choice 79% of the time using orders of magnitude less compute than training a full parser. Within this study, we identify and analyze one recently proposed decoupled LM - RemBERT - and find it strikingly contains less inherent dependency information, but often yields the best parser after full fine-tuning. Without this outlier our approach identifies the best LM in 89% of cases., Comment: Accepted at NAACL 2022 (Main Conference)

The field of Deep Learning (DL) has undergone explosive growth during the last decade, with a substantial impact on Natural Language Processing (NLP) as well. Yet, compared to more established disciplines, a lack of common experimental standards remains an open challenge to the field at large. Starting from fundamental scientific principles, we distill ongoing discussions on experimental standards in NLP into a single, widely-applicable methodology. Following these best practices is crucial to strengthen experimental evidence, improve reproducibility and support scientific progress. These standards are further collected in a public repository to help them transparently adapt to future needs.

Probing has become an important tool for analyzing representations in Natural Language Processing (NLP). For graphical NLP tasks such as dependency parsing, linear probes are currently limited to extracting undirected or unlabeled parse trees which do not capture the full task. This work introduces DepProbe, a linear probe which can extract labeled and directed dependency parse trees from embeddings while using fewer parameters and compute than prior methods. Leveraging its full task coverage and lightweight parametrization, we investigate its predictive power for selecting the best transfer language for training a full biaffine attention parser. Across 13 languages, our proposed method identifies the best source treebank 94% of the time, outperforming competitive baselines and prior work. Finally, we analyze the informativeness of task-specific subspaces in contextual embeddings as well as which benefits a full parser's non-linear parametrization provides., Comment: Accepted at ACL 2022 (Main Conference)

This work provides the first in-depth analysis of genre in Universal Dependencies (UD). In contrast to prior work on genre identification which uses small sets of well-defined labels in mono-/bilingual setups, UD contains 18 genres with varying degrees of specificity spread across 114 languages. As most treebanks are labeled with multiple genres while lacking annotations about which instances belong to which genre, we propose four methods for predicting instance-level genre using weak supervision from treebank metadata. The proposed methods recover instance-level genre better than competitive baselines as measured on a subset of UD with labeled instances and adhere better to the global expected distribution. Our analysis sheds light on prior work using UD genre metadata for treebank selection, finding that metadata alone are a noisy signal and must be disentangled within treebanks before it can be universally applied., Comment: Accepted at SyntaxFest 2021

With an increase of dataset availability, the potential for learning from a variety of data sources has increased. One particular method to improve learning from multiple data sources is to embed the data source during training. This allows the model to learn generalizable features as well as distinguishing features between datasets. However, these dataset embeddings have mostly been used before contextualized transformer-based embeddings were introduced in the field of Natural Language Processing. In this work, we compare two methods to embed datasets in a transformer-based multilingual dependency parser, and perform an extensive evaluation. We show that: 1) embedding the dataset is still beneficial with these models 2) performance increases are highest when embedding the dataset at the encoder level 3) unsurprisingly, we confirm that performance increases are highest for small datasets and datasets with a low baseline score. 4) we show that training on the combination of all datasets performs similarly to designing smaller clusters based on language-relatedness., Comment: Accepted to TLT at SyntaxFest 2021

Recent work has shown that monolingual masked language models learn to represent data-driven notions of language variation which can be used for domain-targeted training data selection. Dataset genre labels are already frequently available, yet remain largely unexplored in cross-lingual setups. We harness this genre metadata as a weak supervision signal for targeted data selection in zero-shot dependency parsing. Specifically, we project treebank-level genre information to the finer-grained sentence level, with the goal to amplify information implicitly stored in unsupervised contextualized representations. We demonstrate that genre is recoverable from multilingual contextual embeddings and that it provides an effective signal for training data selection in cross-lingual, zero-shot scenarios. For 12 low-resource language treebanks, six of which are test-only, our genre-specific methods significantly outperform competitive baselines as well as recent embedding-based methods for data selection. Moreover, genre-based data selection provides new state-of-the-art results for three of these target languages., Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2021 (Main Conference)