SkiLLens: Recognising and Mapping Novel Skills from Millions of Job Ads Across Europe Using Language Models

Alessia De Santo, Lorenzo Malandri, Fabio Mercorio, Mario Mezzanzanica, Navid Nobani


Abstract
In a rapidly evolving labor market, detecting and addressing emerging skill needs is essential for shaping responsive education and workforce policies. Online job advertisements (OJAs) provide a real-time view of changing demands, but require first retrieving skill mentions from unstructured text and then solving the entity linking problem of connecting them to standardized skill taxonomies. To harness this potential, we present a multilingual human-in-the-loop (HITL) pipeline that operates in two steps: candidate skills are extracted from national OJA corpora using country-specific word embeddings, capturing terms that reflect each country’s labor market. These candidates are linked to ESCO using an encoder-based system and refined through a decoder large language models (LLMs) for accurate contextual alignment. Our approach is validated through both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, demonstrating that our method enables timely, multilingual monitoring of emerging skills, supporting agile policy-making and targeted training initiatives.
Anthology ID:
2026.eacl-industry.65
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Yevgen Matusevych, Gülşen Eryiğit, Nikolaos Aletras
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
877–885
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-industry.65/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alessia De Santo, Lorenzo Malandri, Fabio Mercorio, Mario Mezzanzanica, and Navid Nobani. 2026. SkiLLens: Recognising and Mapping Novel Skills from Millions of Job Ads Across Europe Using Language Models. In Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track), pages 877–885, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SkiLLens: Recognising and Mapping Novel Skills from Millions of Job Ads Across Europe Using Language Models (De Santo et al., EACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-industry.65.pdf