LABOR-LLM: Language-Based Occupational Representations with Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Athey, Susan, Brunborg, Herman, Du, Tianyu, Kanodia, Ayush, Vafa, Keyon
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Athey, Susan
Brunborg, Herman
Du, Tianyu
Kanodia, Ayush
Vafa, Keyon
author_facet Athey, Susan
Brunborg, Herman
Du, Tianyu
Kanodia, Ayush
Vafa, Keyon
contents This paper builds an empirical model that predicts a worker's next occupation as a function of the worker's occupational history. Because histories are sequences of occupations, the covariate space is high-dimensional, and further, the outcome (the next occupation) is a discrete choice that can take on many values. To estimate the parameters of the model, we leverage an approach from generative artificial intelligence. Estimation begins from a ``foundation model'' trained on non-representative data and then ``fine-tunes'' the estimation using data about careers from a representative survey. We convert tabular data from the survey into text files that resemble resumes and fine-tune the parameters of the foundation model, a large language model (LLM), using these text files with the objective of predicting the next token (word). The resulting fine-tuned LLM is used to calculate estimates of worker transition probabilities. Its predictive performance surpasses all prior models, both for the task of granularly predicting the next occupation as well as for specific tasks such as predicting whether the worker changes occupations or stays in the labor force. We quantify the value of fine-tuning and further show that by adding more career data from a different population, fine-tuning smaller LLMs (fewer parameters) surpasses the performance of fine-tuning larger models. When we omit the English language occupational title and replace it with a unique code, predictive performance declines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_17972
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LABOR-LLM: Language-Based Occupational Representations with Large Language Models
Athey, Susan
Brunborg, Herman
Du, Tianyu
Kanodia, Ayush
Vafa, Keyon
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Econometrics
This paper builds an empirical model that predicts a worker's next occupation as a function of the worker's occupational history. Because histories are sequences of occupations, the covariate space is high-dimensional, and further, the outcome (the next occupation) is a discrete choice that can take on many values. To estimate the parameters of the model, we leverage an approach from generative artificial intelligence. Estimation begins from a ``foundation model'' trained on non-representative data and then ``fine-tunes'' the estimation using data about careers from a representative survey. We convert tabular data from the survey into text files that resemble resumes and fine-tune the parameters of the foundation model, a large language model (LLM), using these text files with the objective of predicting the next token (word). The resulting fine-tuned LLM is used to calculate estimates of worker transition probabilities. Its predictive performance surpasses all prior models, both for the task of granularly predicting the next occupation as well as for specific tasks such as predicting whether the worker changes occupations or stays in the labor force. We quantify the value of fine-tuning and further show that by adding more career data from a different population, fine-tuning smaller LLMs (fewer parameters) surpasses the performance of fine-tuning larger models. When we omit the English language occupational title and replace it with a unique code, predictive performance declines.
title LABOR-LLM: Language-Based Occupational Representations with Large Language Models
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Econometrics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.17972