Semantic Matching of IT Vocational Training Offers with the ESCO Ontology
Katerina Kostadinovska, Kristine Hein
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15439/2026F8838
Citation: Katerina Kostadinovska, Kristine Hein (2026). Semantic Matching of IT Vocational Training Offers with the ESCO Ontology. In M. Bolanowski, M. Ganzha, M. Grzegorowski, L. Maciaszek, M. Paprzycki, A. Paszkiewicz, D. Ślęzak (eds), Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Computer Science and Intelligence Systems (FedCSIS). ACSIS, Vol. 49, pages 53–57.
Abstract. This paper presents a pipeline for semantically matching IT vocational training offers from the KURSNet database to skills defined in the ESCO ontology. The proposed approach combines semantic IT filtering, LLM-based keyword cleaning, and embedding-based matching using Sentence Trans former models. Applied to a dataset of 6,128 IT training courses with 16,372 unique keywords, the pipeline successfully maps 63.4\% of keywords to ESCO skills at a cosine similarity threshold of 0.75. Evaluation against a manually annotated gold standard of 1,000 keyword-ESCO pairs yields a precision of 61.8\%, with an inter-annotator agreement of κ = 0.91. The results demonstrate that embedding-based methods are suitable for bridging semi-structured national training data with standardized European competency frameworks.
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