Rabih Zbib

Matthias De Lange, Warre Veys, Federico Retyk et al.

Today's evolving labor markets rely increasingly on recommender systems for hiring, talent management, and workforce analytics, with natural language processing (NLP) capabilities at the core. Yet, research in this area remains highly fragmented. Studies employ divergent ontologies (ESCO, O*NET, national taxonomies), heterogeneous task formulations, and diverse model families, making cross-study comparison and reproducibility exceedingly difficult. General-purpose benchmarks lack coverage of work-specific tasks, and the inherent sensitivity of employment data further limits open evaluation. We present \textbf{WorkRB} (Work Research Benchmark), the first open-source, community-driven benchmark tailored to work-domain AI. WorkRB organizes 13 diverse tasks from 7 task groups as unified recommendation and NLP tasks, including job/skill recommendation, candidate recommendation, similar item recommendation, and skill extraction and normalization. WorkRB enables both monolingual and cross-lingual evaluation settings through dynamic loading of multilingual ontologies. Developed within a multi-stakeholder ecosystem of academia, industry, and public institutions, WorkRB has a modular design for seamless contributions and enables integration of proprietary tasks without disclosing sensitive data. WorkRB is available under the Apache 2.0 license at https://github.com/techwolf-ai/WorkRB.

Casimiro Pio Carrino, Paula Estrella, Rabih Zbib et al.

We introduce JobResQA, a multilingual Question Answering benchmark for evaluating Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) capabilities of LLMs on HR-specific tasks involving résumés and job descriptions. The dataset comprises 581 QA pairs across 105 synthetic résumé-job description pairs in five languages (English, Spanish, Italian, German, and Chinese), with questions spanning three complexity levels from basic factual extraction to complex cross-document reasoning. We propose a data generation pipeline derived from real-world sources through de-identification and data synthesis to ensure both realism and privacy, while controlled demographic and professional attributes (implemented via placeholders) enable systematic bias and fairness studies. We also present a cost-effective, human-in-the-loop translation pipeline based on the TEaR methodology, incorporating MQM error annotations and selective post-editing to ensure an high-quality multi-way parallel benchmark. We provide a baseline evaluations across multiple open-weight LLM families using an LLM-as-judge approach revealing higher performances on English and Spanish but substantial degradation for other languages, highlighting critical gaps in multilingual MRC capabilities for HR applications. JobResQA provides a reproducible benchmark for advancing fair and reliable LLM-based HR systems. The benchmark is publicly available at: https://github.com/Avature/jobresqa-benchmark

Rabih Zbib, Lucas Alvarez Lacasa, Federico Retyk et al.

Measuring semantic similarity between job titles is an essential functionality for automatic job recommendations. This task is usually approached using supervised learning techniques, which requires training data in the form of equivalent job title pairs. In this paper, we instead propose an unsupervised representation learning method for training a job title similarity model using noisy skill labels. We show that it is highly effective for tasks such as text ranking and job normalization.

Federico Retyk, Hermenegildo Fabregat, Juan Aizpuru et al.

Extracting information from résumés is typically formulated as a two-stage problem, where the document is first segmented into sections and then each section is processed individually to extract the target entities. Instead, we cast the whole problem as sequence labeling in two levels -- lines and tokens -- and study model architectures for solving both tasks simultaneously. We build high-quality résumé parsing corpora in English, French, Chinese, Spanish, German, Portuguese, and Swedish. Based on these corpora, we present experimental results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed models for the information extraction task, outperforming approaches introduced in previous work. We conduct an ablation study of the proposed architectures. We also analyze both model performance and resource efficiency, and describe the trade-offs for model deployment in the context of a production environment.

Luis Gasco, Hermenegildo Fabregat, Laura García-Sardiña et al.

Advances in natural language processing and large language models are driving a major transformation in Human Capital Management, with a growing interest in building smart systems based on language technologies for talent acquisition, upskilling strategies, and workforce planning. However, the adoption and progress of these technologies critically depend on the development of reliable and fair models, properly evaluated on public data and open benchmarks, which have so far been unavailable in this domain. To address this gap, we present TalentCLEF 2025, the first evaluation campaign focused on skill and job title intelligence. The lab consists of two tasks: Task A - Multilingual Job Title Matching, covering English, Spanish, German, and Chinese; and Task B - Job Title-Based Skill Prediction, in English. Both corpora were built from real job applications, carefully anonymized, and manually annotated to reflect the complexity and diversity of real-world labor market data, including linguistic variability and gender-marked expressions. The evaluations included monolingual and cross-lingual scenarios and covered the evaluation of gender bias. TalentCLEF attracted 76 registered teams with more than 280 submissions. Most systems relied on information retrieval techniques built with multilingual encoder-based models fine-tuned with contrastive learning, and several of them incorporated large language models for data augmentation or re-ranking. The results show that the training strategies have a larger effect than the size of the model alone. TalentCLEF provides the first public benchmark in this field and encourages the development of robust, fair, and transferable language technologies for the labor market.

Laura García-Sardiña, Hermenegildo Fabregat, Daniel Deniz et al.

This work sets the ground for studying how explicit grammatical gender assignment in job titles can affect the results of automatic job ranking systems. We propose the usage of metrics for ranking comparison controlling for gender to evaluate gender bias in job title ranking systems, in particular RBO (Rank-Biased Overlap). We generate and share test sets for a job title matching task in four grammatical gender languages, including occupations in masculine and feminine form and annotated by gender and matching relevance. We use the new test sets and the proposed methodology to evaluate the gender bias of several out-of-the-box multilingual models to set as baselines, showing that all of them exhibit varying degrees of gender bias.

Hendra Setiawan, Zhongqiang Huang, Jacob Devlin et al.

We present a three-pronged approach to improving Statistical Machine Translation (SMT), building on recent success in the application of neural networks to SMT. First, we propose new features based on neural networks to model various non-local translation phenomena. Second, we augment the architecture of the neural network with tensor layers that capture important higher-order interaction among the network units. Third, we apply multitask learning to estimate the neural network parameters jointly. Each of our proposed methods results in significant improvements that are complementary. The overall improvement is +2.7 and +1.8 BLEU points for Arabic-English and Chinese-English translation over a state-of-the-art system that already includes neural network features.