M.Sc. Seminar: Negin Nahoomi

Title: Developing an Automatic Method for Coding Occupation Titles to Standard Occupational Classification (SOC)

Advisor: Dr. Gary Grewal
Committee Member: Dr. Andrew Hamilton-Wright

Abstract:

Social scientists are analyzing the gender wage gap in the Ontario public sector salary disclosure, also known as the Sunshine List. In order to achieve this goal, the Sunshine List occupation titles must be coded to a standard classification. Occupation coding is the process of classifying occupations into one of the hundreds of mutually exclusive categories that are represented by numerical codes. Since analyzing numerical data is simpler than unstructured text, the numerical occupation codes are used by social scientists and statistical agencies to analyze occupational data. Historically, the task of classifying occupation titles to standard classifications was done manually by professional coders. However, manual coding drawbacks such as time and cost ineffectiveness led researchers to develop automatic methods for occupation coding. This research aims to present an automatic method to code Sunshine List occupations to Standard Occupational Classification (SOC).