The domain of human resources (HR) includes a broad spectrum of tasks related to natural language processing (NLP) techniques. Recent breakthroughs in NLP have generated significant interest in its industrial applications in this domain and potentially alleviate challenges such as the difficulty of resource acquisition and the complexity of problems. At the same time, the HR domain can also present unique challenges that drive state-of-the-art in NLP research. To support this, we provide NLP researchers and practitioners with an overview of key HR tasks from an NLP perspective, illustrating how specific sub-tasks (e.g., skill extraction) contribute to broader objectives (e.g., job matching). Through this survey, we identify opportunities in NLP for HR and suggest directions for future exploration.

In this paper, we propose methods for discovering semantic differences in words appearing in two corpora based on the norms of contextualized word vectors. The key idea is that the coverage of meanings is reflected in the norm of its mean word vector. The proposed methods do not require the assumptions concerning words and corpora for comparison that the previous methods do. All they require are to compute the mean vector of contextualized word vectors and its norm for each word type. Nevertheless, they are (i) robust for the skew in corpus size; (ii) capable of detecting semantic differences in infrequent words; and (iii) effective in pinpointing word instances that have a meaning missing in one of the two corpora for comparison. We show these advantages for native and non-native English corpora and also for historical corpora.

Construction Grammar (CxG) has recently been used as the basis for probing studies that have investigated the performance of large pretrained language models (PLMs) with respect to the structure and meaning of constructions. In this position paper, we make suggestions for the continuation and augmentation of this line of research. We look at probing methodology that was not designed with CxG in mind, as well as probing methodology that was designed for specific constructions. We analyse selected previous work in detail, and provide our view of the most important challenges and research questions that this promising new field faces.