The 4th Workshop for RecSys in HR at RecSys2024!

We received notification that our workshop for recommender systems in human resources (RecSys in HR) will be included in the workshop program of the ACM RecSys 2024 Conference which will be held in Bari, Italy 🇮🇹!

This will be the fourth consecutive edition of our workshop at the RecSys conference, following Amsterdam in 2021, Seattle in 2022, and Singapore last year. Very much looking forward to organizing another edition with my fellow workshop organizers: Toine Bogers, Mesut Kaya, Chris Johnson, Jens-Joris Decorte, and excited for welcoming Tijl De Bie (Universiteit Gent) to our organizing team!

Stay tuned for updates at our website: https://recsyshr.aau.dk/ (where for now you can find all proceedings and programs for the last three editions)

Talk on RecSys, NLP, and bias in hiring at the NLP4HR Workshop at EACL2024

I was honored to give the opening talk at the NLP4HR workshop in ☀️ sunny St. Julians, Malta! (bit bummed out I got to do it remotely from 🌧️ overcast and rainy Diemen, The Netherlands 🥸).

I gave a talk on recommender systems, bias, and bias mitigation in hiring with a focus on NLP challenges and solutions, where I adressed some of the open standing challenges in bias in textual data and features, some mitigation strategies, and the overall importancy and urgency of the topic, in light of incoming 🇪🇺 legislation. Such a fairness-filled week, this week 😅.

In addition, our former intern Lois Rink presented her master thesis “Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis for Open-Ended HR Survey Responses” (co-authored with Job Meijdam and myself) at the workshop.

Thanks to Estevam Hruschka and Naoki Otani of Megagon Labs for the invitation and excellent workshop!

Participating in the AIMMES 2024 Workshop

On March 20 I am participating in the first Workshop on AI bias: Measurements, Mitigation, Explanation Strategies Amsterdam, as part of the AI Fairness Cluster Inaugural Conference (FINDHR is part of the AI Fairness Cluster). I am looking forward to this workshop with a strong program, where I have also contributed to the following two papers that were accepted for presentation;

  • Alessandro Fabris, Nina Baranowska, Matthew J. Dennis, David Graus, Philipp Hacker, Jorge Saldivar, Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius and Asia J. Biega Bias Conducive Factors in Algorithmic Hiring
  • Adam Mehdi Arafan, David Graus, Fernando P. Santos and Emma Beauxis-Aussalet End-to-End Bias Mitigation in Candidate Recommender Systems with Fairness Gates (Extended Abstract)
Continue reading “Participating in the AIMMES 2024 Workshop”

“Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis for Open-Ended HR Survey Responses” accepted at NLP4HR workshop at EACL2024

Lois Rink, our former MSc data science intern at Randstad Groep Nederland, has published her thesis at the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Human Resources (NLP4HR), to be held at EACL 2024.

Lois’ thesis is titled Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis for Open-Ended HR Survey Responses, and was written under supervision of Job Meijdam and myself. Get the preprint here or on arXiv:

  • [PDF] L. Rink, J. Meijdam, and D. Graus, “Aspect-based sentiment analysis for open-ended HR survey responses,” in 1st workshop on natural language processing for human resources, 2024.
    [Bibtex]
    @inproceedings{rink2024aspectbased,
    title={Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis for Open-Ended {HR} Survey Responses},
    author={Lois Rink and Job Meijdam and David Graus},
    booktitle={1st Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Human Resources},
    year={2024}
    }

Abstract:

Understanding preferences, opinions, and sentiment of the workforce is paramount for effective employee lifecycle management. Open-ended survey responses serve as a valuable source of information. This paper proposes a machine learning approach for aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) of Dutch open-ended responses in employee satisfaction surveys. Our approach aims to overcome the inherent noise and variability in these responses, enabling a comprehensive analysis of sentiments that can support employee lifecycle management. Through response clustering we identify six key aspects (salary, schedule, contact, communication, personal attention, agreements), which we validate by domain experts. We compile a dataset of 1,458 Dutch survey responses, revealing label imbalance in aspects and sentiments. We propose few-shot approaches for ABSA based on Dutch BERT models, and compare them against bag-of-words and zero-shot baselines. Our work significantly contributes to the field of ABSA by demonstrating the first successful application of Dutch pre-trained language models to aspect-based sentiment analysis in the domain of human resources (HR).

randstad position paper on AI published

Yesterday, randstad published the position paper titled “the labor market and AI.”

It contains some references to the ethical AI work I’ve been working on with my team, specifically: our efforts in internal auditing and bias mitigation strategies for AI-based matching systems, and our membership of the FINDHR consortium in which we collaborate with a number of European academic institutions, industry and civil society partners on fair and non-discriminatory algorithms for human recommendation.

Download the white paper here.

FINDHR CV Data Donation Campaign

🗣️ Please consider donating your (anonymized) CV to advance research into bias mitigation in algorithmic hiring!

With Randstad we are part of a consortium of research institutions (e.g., University of Amsterdam, Radboud Universiteit, Universitat Pompeu Fabra), civil society organizations (e.g., AlgorithmWatch), and companies (e.g., Adevinta) under the EU-funded FINDHR research project.

The FINDHR project aims to:
1️⃣ create new ways to measure algorithmic bias,
2️⃣ propose technical implementations for bias mitigation strategies, and
3️⃣ meaningfully incorporate human expertise
in algorithmic hiring systems (i.e., job/job seeker recommender systems).

To achieve these ambitious goals, the project requires real CVs and résumés. For that reason, FINDHR has initiated a CV donation campaign, where you’ll be able to donate your (anonymized) CV with just a few clicks. These donated CVs will be used to generate a dataset of realistic-but-fake synthetic CVs, that will serve as the basis for studying and developing bias and bias mitigation in job/job seeker recommender systems.

Your donated data will be safe: stored securely, can be deleted/withdrawn at any time upon request, and only accessible to authorized persons in the FINDHR research project who are required to sign confidentiality agreements.

Please consider donating your CV to accelerate research into bias and bias mitigation strategies for algorithmic hiring systems! For more details, check the donation campaign’s FAQ (or ping me!).

Donate your CV with just a couple of clicks here: findhr.eu/datadonation!

Three papers accepted at RecSys in HR 2023

For this year’s edition (the third in a row) of the Recommender Systems in Human Resources workshop, to be held at the ACM RecSys Conference in Singapore, I co-authored three accepted papers:

Enhancing Resume Content Extraction in Question Answering Systems through T5 Model Variant

  • [PDF] Y. Luo, F. Lu, V. Pal, and D. Graus, “Enhancing resume content extraction in question answering systems through t5 model variants,” in Recsys in hr’23: the 3\textsuperscriptrd workshop on recommender systems for human resources, 2023.
    [Bibtex]
    @inproceedings{luo2023enhancing,
    title={Enhancing Resume Content Extraction in Question Answering Systems through T5 Model Variants},
    author={Yuxin Luo and Feng Lu and Vaishali Pal and David Graus},
    year={2023},
    booktitle = {RecSys in HR’23: The 3\textsuperscript{rd} Workshop on Recommender Systems for Human Resources},
    numpages = {10},
    location = {Singapore},
    series = {CEUR Workshop Proceedings},
    month={9}
    }

This paper is based on the MSc Data Science thesis of Yuxin, who was supervised by Feng. Yuxin applied Large Language Models (mT5) to do Question Answering over resumes for information extraction.

Career Path Recommendations for Long-term Income Maximization: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

  • [PDF] S. Avlonitis, D. Lavi, M. Mansoury, and D. Graus, “Career path recommendations for long-term income maximization: a reinforcement learning approach,” in Recsys in hr’23: the 3\textsuperscriptrd workshop on recommender systems for human resources, 2023.
    [Bibtex]
    @inproceedings{avlonitis2023career,
    title={Career Path Recommendations for Long-term Income Maximization: A Reinforcement Learning Approach},
    author={Spyros Avlonitis and Dor Lavi and Masoud Mansoury and David Graus},
    year={2023},
    booktitle = {RecSys in HR’23: The 3\textsuperscript{rd} Workshop on Recommender Systems for Human Resources},
    numpages = {8},
    location = {Singapore},
    series = {CEUR Workshop Proceedings},
    month={9}
    }

This is Spyros’ MSc AI thesis (from 2022), who was jointly supervised by me and Dor. Spyros applied reinforcement learning to career path recommendations, leveraging Randstad’s rich data for simulating an environment in which agents can apply for jobs, be hired, and receive salary.

Enhancing PLM Performance on Labour Market Tasks via Instruction-based Finetuning and Prompt-tuning with Rules

  • [PDF] J. Vrolijk and D. Graus, “Enhancing PLM performance on labour market tasks via instruction-based finetuning and prompt-tuning with rules,” in Recsys in hr’23: the 3\textsuperscriptrd workshop on recommender systems for human resources, 2023.
    [Bibtex]
    @inproceedings{vrolijk2023enhancing,
    title={Enhancing {PLM} Performance on Labour Market Tasks via Instruction-based Finetuning and Prompt-tuning with Rules},
    author={Jarno Vrolijk and David Graus},
    year={2023},
    booktitle = {RecSys in HR’23: The 3\textsuperscript{rd} Workshop on Recommender Systems for Human Resources},
    numpages = {10},
    location = {Singapore},
    series = {CEUR Workshop Proceedings},
    month={9}
    }

This paper is based on work by Jarno on using structured taxonomy data for training and fine-tuning Large Language Models for different downstream tasks (such as relation classification, entity linking, and question answering).

See the full list of accepted papers.

in “Shaping the Future” podcast on inclusive algorithms

Happy I was invited to contribute to this podcast (🇳🇱) about inclusivity in algorithms.

Together with Tekla de Veer from DEPT®, I talk with Jimmy de Vreede (Springbok Agency and the DDMA committee Data, Decisions & Engagement) about everything from bias in generative AI, composition of data science teams, to technological possibilities in reducing bias in processes that often consist of a jumble of human and technology-assisted decisions (with so many different forms of bias).

Listen to the podcast below:

and/or read the summary in the article below on

Beyond Ethics Washing: Impact Assessments, Audits, and Oversight for AI panel recording available

CPDP Conferences published the recording of the “Beyond Ethics Washing” panel on YouTube, moderated by Mirko Tobias Schäfer (Utrecht University) with Iris Muis (Utrecht Data School), Paul Nemitz (European Commission), Maria Koomen (Open Governance Network for Europe) and myself.

Watch it below (and watch all the other panels on CPDP’s YouTube channel):

Interviewed by The Netherlands Institute for Human Rights

I was interviewed by the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights, along with Joke de Groot, director HR flex at Randstad Groep Nederland, on AI and bias in the context of algorithmic matching. Read the full article (in Dutch) here: ‘Collega’s zullen nooit volledig afgaan op wat onze algoritmes zeggen’

DDMA Digital Talk: “De AI act: Zo bereid jij je optimaal voor”

I’ll be part of a panel during a Digital Talk by the DDMA, to talk about the AI Act, and its potential implications for data-driven marketeers, alongside Peter van der Putten (PEGA / Leiden Universiteit) and Romar van der Leij (DDMA).

See all the details (in Dutch) at the DDMA event page.

CPDP2023 panel “Beyond Ethics Washing: Impact Assessments, Audits, and Oversight for AI”

Update: see a writeup of our panel here

Excited to be participating in a panel at the “Computers, Privacy & Data Protection” (CPDP) conference in Brussels. The panel is organized by Mirko Schäfer (Utrecht University), and I’ll be engaging in a conversation with Iris Muis (Utrecht Data School), Paul Nemitz (European Commission) and Maria Koomen (Open Governance Network for Europe). I’ll be wearing my industry hat to talk about implementing practices that stimulate responsible AI, auditing, legislation, and more!

Check the complete program on the CPDP website. I was at CPDP in 2020, too, when I sat on a panel on Algorithms and AI-driven technologies in the information society

RecSys in HR 2023 Workshop at ACM RecSys 2023

Very excited that this year too I will engage in one of my favorite “extra-curricular activities” 😅: our proposal to organize the (third!) “Recommender Systems in Human Resources” workshop has been accepted in the the program of the 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems!

After our first edition in Amsterdam in 2021, and the second in Seattle in 2022, this year our workshop will be co-located with the RecSys conference in Singapore!

Looking forward to creating an engaging program with our fantastic organizing committee consisting of Toine Bogers (IT University of Copenhagen), Mesut Kaya (Aalborg University Copenhagen), Chris Johnson (Indeed.com), and welcoming Jens-Joris Decorte (of TechWolf) on board this year!

Call for papers forthcoming! Keep an eye on our workshop’s website: https://recsyshr.aau.dk/

Guest lecture on “Job Recommendation” at RecSys Summer School 2023

I look forward to giving a guest lecture on “Job Recommendation” alongside Mesut Kaya at the RecSys Summer School 2023 in Copenhagen 🇩🇰!

It was only 4 years ago when I stood side-by-side with Daan Odijk for a lecture and hands-on workshop on “Recommender Systems in the Media Industry,” at the last RecSys Summer School in 2019, which was held in Gothenburg 🇸🇪!

Happy to be back with the same stuff (#recsys), different domain (#jobs) :-).

See the program, and register for attendance on the RecSys Summer School 2023 website!

Update: lecture done!