Refining semantic matching for job recruitment: An application of formal concept analysis

Abstract

A profile describes a set of skills a person may have or a set of skills required for a particular job. Profile matching aims to determine how well the given profile fits the requested profile. Skills are organized into ontologies that form a lattice by the specialization relation. Matching functions were defined based on filters of the lattice generated by the profiles. In the present paper the ontology lattice is extended by additional information in form of so called extra edges that represent some kind of quantifiable relationship between skills. This allows refinement of profile matching based on these relations between skills. However, that may introduce directed cycles and lattice structure is lost. We show a construction of weighted directed acyclic graphs that gets rid of the cycles, and then present a way to use formal concept analysis to gain back the lattice structure and the ability to apply filters. We also give sharp estimates how the sizes of the original ontology lattice and our new constructions relate.