@inproceedings{jalilian-etal-2026-enhancing,
    title = "Enhancing Job Evaluation with Data Augmentation and Text Classification",
    author = "Jalilian, Samaneh  and
      Weeren, Niels van  and
      Shokri, Mohammad  and
      Bijl, Thijmen  and
      Verberne, Suzan",
    editor = "Li, Yunyao  and
      Rehm, Georg  and
      Tu, Mei",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics ({ACL} 2026)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-industry.59/",
    pages = "872--883",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-394-4",
    abstract = "Accurate job grading and evaluation are essential for ensuring fair compensation in Human Resources (HR) planning. In this research, we propose to improve job evaluation by semi-automating a manual, time-consuming, and inconsistent process with text-based classification models. We address three prediction tasks: job title classification, grading, and compensation prediction. For job title classification, we fine-tune a RoBERTa model for classification and use Gemini to generate synthetic job descriptions for rare job titles. For grade and compensation prediction, we compare TF-IDF and transformer-based embeddings (DistilRoBERTa, MPNet, MiniLM) in combination with deep neural networks and tree-based models (Random Forest, XGBoost). We optimize all models using grid search with hyperparameter tuning and cross-validation. The results show that job title classification by RoBERTa with Gemini-generated descriptions works well with an accuracy of about 97{\%}. In our regression experiments, our models get promising results: for grade prediction, a tuned TF-IDF + XGBoost model achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.185, and for annual salary prediction, MiniLM embeddings with XGBoost get an MAE of {\texteuro}1,587. These findings demonstrate that a semi-automated pipeline can enhance traditional manual processes by boosting consistency, speeding up HR workflows, and reducing biased assessments."
}