---
language:
  - en
  - fr
  - de
license: mit
library_name: sentence-transformers
base_model: intfloat/multilingual-e5-base
pipeline_tag: sentence-similarity
tags:
  - sentence-transformers
  - sentence-similarity
  - feature-extraction
  - job-titles
  - retrieval
  - contrastive-learning
  - matryoshka
  - cross-lingual
  - esco
  - onet
---

# job-title-normalizer-e5-base

A sentence encoder fine-tuned to **normalize messy, multilingual job titles to a canonical
occupation taxonomy** (ESCO + O*NET), framed and evaluated as **retrieval**: embed a noisy or
foreign-language title (the *query*) and retrieve the closest canonical occupation label (the
*passage*) from a fixed corpus of 4,055 occupations.

**Live demo:** <https://job-title-normalizer-525186107937.us-central1.run.app> (Cloud Run; may cold-start ~1 min) ·
**Lighter variant:** [job-title-normalizer-e5-small](https://huggingface.co/Misbahuddin/job-title-normalizer-e5-small)

> **Why retrieval, not classification?** Occupation taxonomies have thousands of classes and the
> label set evolves constantly. A nearest-neighbour retriever over embeddings generalizes to
> unseen labels and lets you swap the corpus without retraining a softmax head.

## Results

Held-out test set of **15,248 real ESCO/O*NET titles** against a 4,055-occupation corpus.
The split is **by occupation** (zero overlap between train/val/test occupations, asserted at
build time), so every test occupation is unseen during training.

| Slice | Method | Recall@1 | Recall@5 | Recall@10 | MRR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | BM25 (lexical) | 0.095 | 0.163 | 0.183 | 0.124 |
| Overall | zero-shot e5-base | 0.237 | 0.378 | 0.437 | 0.298 |
| Overall | **this model** | **0.381** | **0.572** | **0.645** | **0.463** |
| FR→EN | **this model** | **0.548** | **0.774** | **0.847** | **0.643** |
| DE→EN | **this model** | **0.536** | **0.792** | **0.852** | **0.642** |

Cross-lingual context: BM25 scores **MRR 0.034** on the FR/DE→EN slice (a French query shares
almost no tokens with an English canonical label); this model reaches **0.643** — lexical
search structurally cannot do this task, and fine-tuning adds ~35% over the zero-shot base.

## Training

- **Base:** [`intfloat/multilingual-e5-base`](https://huggingface.co/intfloat/multilingual-e5-base) (mean pooling, `query:`/`passage:` prefixes, 768-dim).
- **Objective:** in-batch-negatives InfoNCE (`MultipleNegativesRankingLoss`, scale 20 ≈ temperature 0.05), wrapped in **MatryoshkaLoss** (dims 768/512/256/128/64) so truncated embeddings stay usable.
- **Data:** 160,240 positive pairs (synonyms, alternate titles, and cross-lingual label pairs of the same occupation) built from ESCO (EN/FR/DE) and O*NET alternate titles; ≤50 pairs per occupation.
- **Setup:** 2 epochs, batch 64, lr 2e-5, warmup 10%, max_seq_len 64, fp16, `NoDuplicatesDataLoader` to reduce in-batch false negatives. Trained on an RTX 4060 Laptop (8 GB) in ~46 min.
- Prefixes are baked into the training text exactly as applied at inference, and the preset is persisted (`tn_preset.json`) so downstream tooling recovers the correct behavior.

## How to use

The e5 family needs **asymmetric prefixes**: encode input titles as `query: …` and canonical
labels as `passage: …`. Forgetting them silently degrades accuracy.

```python
from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer
from sentence_transformers.util import cos_sim

model = SentenceTransformer("Misbahuddin/job-title-normalizer-e5-base")

canonicals = [
    "passage: software developer",
    "passage: data scientist",
    "passage: nurse responsible for general care",
]
query = "query: Ingénieur logiciel"          # French → English canonical

q = model.encode(query, normalize_embeddings=True)
c = model.encode(canonicals, normalize_embeddings=True)
scores = cos_sim(q, c)[0]
print(canonicals[int(scores.argmax())], float(scores.max()))
# passage: software developer ~0.79
```

Vectors are L2-normalized, so cosine == dot product — index canonical embeddings with FAISS
`IndexFlatIP` for production search. **Matryoshka:** you may truncate embeddings to 256/128/64
dims (then re-normalize) for cheaper indexes without re-encoding.

**Calibrate an abstention threshold.** Out-of-taxonomy queries still return a nearest
neighbour — but at tellingly low scores (e.g. "RevOps", which has no ESCO/O*NET occupation,
scores ~0.31 vs ~0.8 for true matches). Reject below a threshold tuned on your data.

## Intended use & limitations

- **In scope:** normalizing titles from resumes, postings, CRM/ATS/HRIS records to occupation
  IDs; semantic occupation search; FR/DE→EN cross-lingual lookup.
- **Not a hiring/screening/compensation decision system.** Similarity of role *names* says
  nothing about people. Keep a human in the loop for consequential uses.
- **Coverage is bounded by ESCO + O*NET** (with a European resp. U.S. framing); en/fr/de only
  is verified. ESCO and O*NET overlap conceptually, so near-duplicate occupations exist across
  the two namespaces.
- Tuned for short titles (max 64 tokens); long descriptions are out of distribution.

## Acknowledgements

- **ESCO** — © European Union; reused under Commission Decision 2011/833/EU. <https://esco.ec.europa.eu/>
- **O*NET** — by the National Center for O*NET Development for USDOL/ETA; CC BY 4.0. <https://www.onetcenter.org/>

> O*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA. This model was produced using O*NET data but is not
> endorsed by USDOL/ETA. ESCO is a service of the European Commission; this model is not
> endorsed by the Commission.