Semantic Similarity Strategies for Job Title Classification

Automatic and accurate classification of items enables numerous downstream applications in many domains. These applications can range from faceted browsing of items to product recommendations and big data analytics. In the online recruitment domain, we refer to classifying job ads to pre-defined or custom occupation categories as job title classification. A large-scale job title classification system can power various downstream applications such as semantic search, job recommendations and labor market analytics. In this paper, we discuss experiments conducted to improve our in-house job title classification system. The classification component of the system is composed of a two-stage coarse and fine level classifier cascade that classifies input text such as job title and/or job ads to one of the thousands of job titles in our taxonomy. To improve classification accuracy and effectiveness, we experiment with various semantic representation strategies such as average W2V vectors and document similarity measures such as Word Movers Distance (WMD). Our initial results show an overall improvement in accuracy of Carotene[1].