Kaichun Yao

Occupation-specific job tasks (OSTs) refer to the duties, responsibilities, and activities associated with a particular occupation, which define the core functions and performance expectations for those engaged in that profession. Efficient recognition and extraction of OSTs from large-scale job description data are essential for establishing a continually updated occupational information system (OIS), such as O*NET, which serves as critical tools for advancing research in work and labor markets. However, this task presents substantial challenges due to its heavy reliance on domain experts for the labor-intensive annotation of job postings, rendering the process time-consuming and difficult to scale for large-scale implementation. To this end, in this article, we present COTR , a novel data-driven framework designed for the efficient recognition of OSTs from job postings, capable of continually identifying new tasks through class-incremental learning. Specifically, we first employ large language models (LLMs) and prompt learning to develop a three-phase process–“expansion, translation, and generation”–that addresses the critical challenge of the absence of predefined OSTs in non-English labor market data, leveraging O*NET as a foundational reference. Subsequently, we introduce a BERT-based model for OST recognition, incorporating a uniquely designed pair-wise loss function that distills valuable insights from ChatGPT or other LLMs, thereby substantially enhancing recognition performance. In addition, to achieve cost-effective training data annotation, we develop an LLM-based coarse-to-fine candidate OSTs generation algorithm, integrating contrastive active learning to optimize the annotation process through human-machine collaboration. Notably, we design a supervised fine-tuning strategy with a novel encoding technique to optimize LLMs, improving the recall rate of the generated candidate OSTs and achieving up to a 343-fold increase in annotation efficiency compared to traditional manual expert annotation in our experiments. Afterward, we propose an efficient class-incremental learning method that incorporates an out-of-distribution (OOD) detection module for identifying potential novel OSTs and a fine-tuning module to extend the model’s recognition capabilities to include newly discovered tasks. Finally, we construct two real-world datasets using job posting data collected from the labor markets of China and the United States, respectively. Extensive experiments on the real-world datasets, along with two publicly available datasets, have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed COTR. Furthermore, several case studies showcase the significant benefits of COTR for various downstream applications in labor market analysis, including analyzing the evolving demand for OSTs, assessing the value of OSTs, and recognizing the relationships between OSTs and associated skills.

Code based adversarial attacks play a crucial role in revealing vulnerabilities of software system. Recently, pre-trained programming language models (PLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in various significant software engineering tasks, progressively transforming the paradigm of software development. Despite their impressive capabilities, these powerful models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Therefore, it is necessary to carefully investigate the robustness and vulnerabilities of the PLMs by means of adversarial attacks. Adversarial attacks entail imperceptible input modifications that cause target models to make incorrect predictions. Existing approaches for attacking PLMs often employ either identifier renaming or the greedy algorithm, which may yield sub-optimal performance or lead to high inference times. In response to these limitations, we propose CARL, an unsupervised black-box attack model that leverages reinforcement learning to generate imperceptible adversarial examples. Specifically, CARL comprises a programming language encoder and a perturbation prediction layer. In order to achieve more effective and efficient attack, we cast the task as a sequence decision-making process, optimizing through policy gradient with a suite of reward functions. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of CARL on code summarization, code translation, and code refinement tasks, covering various programming languages and PLMs. The experimental results demonstrate that CARL surpasses state-of-the-art code attack models, achieving the highest attack success rate across multiple tasks and PLMs while maintaining high attack efficiency, imperceptibility, consistency, and fluency.

Efficient knowledge management plays a pivotal role in augmenting both the operational efficiency and the innovative capacity of businesses and organizations. By indexing knowledge through vectorization, a variety of knowledge retrieval methods have emerged, significantly enhancing the efficacy of knowledge management systems. Recently, the rapid advancements in generative natural language processing technologies paved the way for generating precise and coherent answers after retrieving relevant documents tailored to user queries. However, for enterprise knowledge bases, assembling extensive training data from scratch for knowledge retrieval and generation is a formidable challenge due to the privacy and security policies of private data, frequently entailing substantial costs. To address the challenge above, in this paper, we propose EKRG, a novel Retrieval-Generation framework based on large language models (LLMs), expertly designed to enable question-answering for Enterprise Knowledge bases with limited annotation costs. Specifically, for the retrieval process, we first introduce an instruction-tuning method using an LLM to generate sufficient document-question pairs for training a knowledge retriever. This method, through carefully designed instructions, efficiently generates diverse questions for enterprise knowledge bases, encompassing both fact-oriented and solution-oriented knowledge. Additionally, we develop a relevance-aware teacher-student learning strategy to further enhance the efficiency of the training process. For the generation process, we propose a novel chain of thought (CoT) based fine-tuning method to empower the LLM-based generator to adeptly respond to user questions using retrieved documents. Finally, extensive experiments on real-world datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

In the contemporary era of widespread online recruitment, resume understanding has been widely acknowledged as a fundamental and crucial task, which aims to extract structured information from resume documents automatically. Compared to the traditional rule-based approaches, the utilization of recently proposed pre-trained document understanding models can greatly enhance the effectiveness of resume understanding. The present approaches have, however, disregarded the hierarchical relations within the structured information presented in resumes, and have difficulty parsing resumes in an efficient manner. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel model, namely ERU, to achieve efficient resume understanding. Specifically, we first introduce a layout-aware multi-modal fusion transformer for encoding the segments in the resume with integrated textual, visual, and layout information. Then, we design three self-supervised tasks to pre-train this module via a large number of unlabeled resumes. Next, we fine-tune the model with a multi-granularity sequence labeling task to extract structured information from resumes. Finally, extensive experiments on a real-world dataset clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of ERU.

Job interviews are the most widely accepted method for companies to select suitable candidates, and a critical challenge is finding the right questions to ask job candidates. Moreover, there is a lack of integrated tools for automatically generating interview questions and recommending the right questions to interviewers. To this end, in this paper, we propose an intelligent system for assisting job interviews, namely, DuerQues. To build this system, we first investigate how to automatically generate skill-oriented interview questions in a scalable way by learning external knowledge from online knowledge-sharing communities. Along this line, we develop a novel distantly supervised skill entity recognition method to identify skill entities from large-scale search queries and web page titles with less need for human annotation. Additionally, we propose a neural generative model for generating skill-oriented interview questions. In particular, we introduce a data-driven solution to create high-quality training instances and design a learning algorithm to improve the performance of question generation. Furthermore, we exploit click-through data from query logs and design a recommender system for recommending suitable questions to interviewers. Specifically, we introduce a graph-enhanced algorithm to efficiently recommend suitable questions given a set of queried skills. Finally, extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our DuerQues system in terms of the quality of generated skill-oriented questions and the performance of question recommendation.

Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of machine-learning-based intelligent recruitment services. Along this line, a large number of emerging models have been proposed, achieving remarkable performance in various tasks, such as person-job fit, job classification and salary prediction. However, existing studies are usually domain/task specific, which significantly hinders the adaptation of models for different industries/tasks with limited training data. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel skill-aware prompt-based pretraining framework, namely RecruitPro, which is capable of learning unified representations on the recruitment data and adapting for various downstream tasks of intelligent recruitment services. To be specific, we first present a contextualized embedding model that is pretrained on a large-scale recruitment dataset. Then, we construct 13 downstream benchmark tasks that are representative in the recruitment process. Along this line, we propose a skill-aware prompt learning module to enhance the adaptability of the pretrained model on downstream tasks. This module includes a skill-related prompt, which is designed to explore key semantic information (i.e., skills) from recruitment text, and a task-related prompt, which is designed to bridge the gap between the pretrained model and different downstream tasks. Moreover, we propose a strategy for extracting potential skills to further improve the performance of our skill-aware prompt learning module. Finally, extensive experiments have clearly demonstrated the effectiveness of RecruitPro. In addition, a case study has been presented to discuss the privacy preserving issue of our RecruitPro.

Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) in information retrieval (IR) applications. Many existing HGNNs design a variety of tailor-made graph convolutions to capture structural and semantic information in heterogeneous graphs. However, existing HGNNs usually represent each node as a single vector in the multi-layer graph convolution calculation, which makes the high-level graph convolution layer fail to distinguish information from different relations and different orders, resulting in the information loss in the message passing. Then we propose a novel heterogeneous graph neural network with sequential node representation, namely Seq-HGNN. To avoid the information loss caused by the single vector node representation, we first design a sequential node representation learning mechanism to represent each node as a sequence of meta-path representations during the node message passing. Then we propose a heterogeneous representation fusion module, empowering Seq-HGNN to identify important meta-paths and aggregate their representations into a compact one. We conduct extensive experiments on four widely used datasets from Heterogeneous Graph Benchmark (HGB) and Open Graph Benchmark (OGB). Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both accuracy and efficiency. The source code is available at https://github.com/nobrowning/SEQ_HGNN.