Emilia García-Casademont

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.

Emília Garcia-Casademont, Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

The syntactic structure of a sentence can be represented as a tree where edges indicate syntactic dependencies between words. When that structure is a star, it has been demonstrated that the head should be placed in the middle of the linear arrangement according to the principle of syntactic dependency distance minimization. However, hubs of stars tend to be put at one of the ends, against that principle. Here we address two questions: (1) How difficult is it to minimize dependency distance? (2) Why anti dependency distance minimization effects have been found in star structures but not in path structures? The ease of optimization is determined by the shape of the optimization landscape. It was demonstrated that the landscape of star structures is quasiconvex (Ferrer-i-Cancho 2015, Language Dynamics and Change). As for (1), here we show that it is indeed convex (a particular case of quasiconvexity) both for star trees and quasistar trees and thus the distance-based optimization problem is simpler than previously believed. As for (2), we argue that (a) competing principles, rather than the difficulty of optimization, must be the actual reason for anti-dependency distance minimization effects and that (b) dependency distance minimization on star-like structures is less rewarding compared to other structures.