Text ranking based on semantic meaning of sentences

Abstract: Finding a suitable candidate to client match is an important part of consultant companies work. It takes a lot of time and effort for the recruiters at the company to read possibly hundreds of resumes to find a suitable candidate. Natural language processing is capable of performing a ranking task where the goal is to rank the resumes with the most suitable candidates ranked the highest. This ensures that the recruiters are only required to look at the top ranked resumes and can quickly get candidates out in the field. Former research has used methods that count specific keywords in resumes and can make decisions on whether a candidate has an experience or not. The main goal of this thesis is to use the semantic meaning of the text in the resumes to get a deeper understanding of a candidate’s level of experience. It also evaluates if the model is possible to run on-device and if the database can contain a mix of English and Swedish resumes. An algorithm was created that uses the word embedding model DistilRoBERTa that is capable of capturing the semantic meaning of text. The algorithm was evaluated by generating job descriptions from the resumes by creating a summary of each resume. The run time, memory usage and the ranking the wanted candidate achieved was documented and used to analyze the results. When the candidate who was used to generate the job description is ranked in the top 10 the classification was considered to be correct. The accuracy was calculated using this method and an accuracy of 68.3% was achieved. The results show that the algorithm is capable of ranking resumes. The algorithm is able to rank both Swedish and English resumes with an accuracy of 67.7% for Swedish resumes and 74.7% for English. The run time was fast enough at an average of 578 ms but the memory usage was too large to make it possible to use the algorithm on-device. In conclusion the semantic meaning of resumes can be used to rank resumes and possible future work would be to combine this method with a method that counts keywords to research if the accuracy would increase.