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Breaking the HISCO Barrier: Automatic Occupational Standardization with OccCANINE

Christian Møller Dahl, Torben Johansen, Christian Vedel

arXiv 21 Feb 2024 · cs.CL · 1 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:2402.13604 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

This paper introduces a new tool, OccCANINE, to automatically transform occupational descriptions into the HISCO classification system. The manual work involved in processing and classifying occupational descriptions is error-prone, tedious, and time-consuming. We finetune a preexisting language model (CANINE) to do this automatically, thereby performing in seconds and minutes what previously took days and weeks. The model is trained on 14 million pairs of occupational descriptions and HISCO codes in 13 different languages contributed by 22 different sources. Our approach is shown to have accuracy, recall, and precision above 90 percent. Our tool breaks the metaphorical HISCO barrier and makes this data readily available for analysis of occupational structures with broad applicability in economics, economic history, and various related disciplines.

Citation extraction

64
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85
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Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1IPUMS APACrefauthors Ruggles, S. , Cleveland, L L. , Dávila, R L. ,… (2025) 20250.9568388%
2Clark2022CANINE APACrefauthors Clark, J H. , Garrette, D. , Turc, I.… (2022) 20220.7373367%
3LinkLives2022Guide APACrefauthors Robinson, O. , Thomsen, A. , Mathi… (2023) 20230.64422100%
4Vedel2023 APACrefauthors Vedel, C. APACrefauthors \ (2025) 20250.64422100%
5ddd_method2015 APACrefauthors Clausen, N F. APACrefauthors \ (2015) 20150.64422100%
6gorges2025tracksmodernityrailroadsgrowth APACrefauthors Görges, T. ,… (2025) 20250.64422100%
7vaswani2017attention APACrefauthors Vaswani, A. , Shazeer, N. , Parm… (2017) 20170.64422100%
8Ford2023 APACrefauthors Ford, N M. APACrefauthors \ (2023) 20230.58531100%
9ipums_cross_walk2017 APACrefauthors Mourits, R. APACrefauthors \ (2017) 20170.5112250%
10Gweon2017 APACrefauthors Gweon, H. , Schonlau, M. , Kaczmirek, L. ,… 20170.51121100%

Showing the top 10 of 64 scored citations.