To promote the development and application of computational social science research, the Faculty of Social Sciences (FSS) at the University of Macau continues to hold computational social sciences workshops in the new academic year. The first workshop of the 2024/2025 academic year was successfully held earlier, where Associate Professor Song Xi from the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and PhD candidate Xu Jiahui in Sociology and Demography at Pennsylvania State University presented their latest research findings.
The research indicates that coding system of occupations are a fundamental concept in social research and policy analysis. However, classifying job descriptions into standardized occupational categories is challenging, because it involves expert manual coding, translating detailed, often ambiguous job descriptions to standardized categories that is a laborious and costly process. With the advancement of computational techniques, automated coding has gradually become an efficient alternative. However, these methods primarily rely on string matching, ignoring the semantic meanings of job descriptions. Therefore, the research team introduced a T5-OCC model based on Google’s text-to-text transfer technology. Using the 2019 American Community Survey as an example, they showed the T5 auto coder substantially improved coding accuracy.
Prof. Song’s team concluded that future research could further apply the T5-OCC model to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of automated occupational coding.
Prof. Xi Song is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Demography at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. She received the 2021 William Julius Wilson Early Career Award from the American Sociological Association. Her previous publications have received multiple awards from the American Sociological Association, the International Sociological Association, IPUMS, and the Demographic Research.
FSS will hold the second computational social science workshop in November. Interested parties are encouraged to stay tuned for the latest announcements from the faculty.
