T-shaped expert mining: a novel approach based on skill translation and focal loss

Abstract

Hiring knowledgeable and cost-effective individuals, who use their knowledge and expertise to boost the organization, is extremely important for organizations as they are the most valuable assets. T-shaped experts are the best option based on agile methodology. The T-shaped professional has a deep understanding of one topic and broad knowledge of several others. Compared to other types of professionals, T-shaped professionals are better communicators and cheaper to hire. Finding T-shaped experts in a given skill area requires determining each candidate’s depth of knowledge and shape of expertise. To estimate each candidate’s depth of knowledge in a given skill area, we propose a translation-based method that utilizes two attention-based skill translation models to overcome the vocabulary mismatch between skills and user documents. We also propose two new approaches based on binary cross-entropy and focal loss to determine whether each user is T-shaped. Our experiments on three collections of the StackOverflow dataset demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed method compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.