Skill Extraction for Domain-Specific Text Retrieval in a Job-Matching Platform.

We discuss a domain-specific retrieval application for matching job seekers with open positions that uses a novel syntactic method of extracting skill-terms from the text of natural language job advertisements. Our new method is contrasted with two word embeddings methods, using word2vec. We define the notion of a skill headword, and present an algorithm that learns syntactic dependency patterns to recognize skill-terms. In all metrics, our syntactic method outperforms both word embeddings methods. Moreover, the word embeddings approaches were unable to model a meaningful distinction between skill-terms and non-skill-terms, while our syntactic approach was able to perform this successfully. We also show how these extracted skills can be used to automatically construct a semantic job-skills ontology, and facilitate a job-to-candidate matching system.