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Main Authors: Xu, Dawei, Yang, Haoran, Rizoiu, Marian-Andrei, Xu, Guandong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09021
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author Xu, Dawei
Yang, Haoran
Rizoiu, Marian-Andrei
Xu, Guandong
author_facet Xu, Dawei
Yang, Haoran
Rizoiu, Marian-Andrei
Xu, Guandong
contents As automation technologies continue to advance at an unprecedented rate, concerns about job displacement and the future of work have become increasingly prevalent. While existing research has primarily focused on the potential impact of automation at the occupation level, there has been a lack of investigation into the automatability of individual tasks. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a BERT-based classifier to predict the automatability of tasks in the forthcoming decade at a granular level leveraging the context and semantics information of tasks. We leverage three public datasets: O*NET Task Statements, ESCO Skills, and Australian Labour Market Insights Tasks, and perform expert annotation. Our BERT-based classifier, fine-tuned on our task statement data, demonstrates superior performance over traditional machine learning models, neural network architectures, and other transformer models. Our findings also indicate that approximately 25.1% of occupations within the O*NET database are at substantial risk of automation, with a diverse spectrum of automation vulnerability across sectors. This research provides a robust tool for assessing the future impact of automation on the labor market, offering valuable insights for policymakers, workers, and industry leaders in the face of rapid technological advancement.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_09021
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Occupations to Tasks: A New Perspective on Automatability Prediction Using BERT
Xu, Dawei
Yang, Haoran
Rizoiu, Marian-Andrei
Xu, Guandong
Computers and Society
As automation technologies continue to advance at an unprecedented rate, concerns about job displacement and the future of work have become increasingly prevalent. While existing research has primarily focused on the potential impact of automation at the occupation level, there has been a lack of investigation into the automatability of individual tasks. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a BERT-based classifier to predict the automatability of tasks in the forthcoming decade at a granular level leveraging the context and semantics information of tasks. We leverage three public datasets: O*NET Task Statements, ESCO Skills, and Australian Labour Market Insights Tasks, and perform expert annotation. Our BERT-based classifier, fine-tuned on our task statement data, demonstrates superior performance over traditional machine learning models, neural network architectures, and other transformer models. Our findings also indicate that approximately 25.1% of occupations within the O*NET database are at substantial risk of automation, with a diverse spectrum of automation vulnerability across sectors. This research provides a robust tool for assessing the future impact of automation on the labor market, offering valuable insights for policymakers, workers, and industry leaders in the face of rapid technological advancement.
title From Occupations to Tasks: A New Perspective on Automatability Prediction Using BERT
topic Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09021