UniSkill: A Dataset for Matching University Curricula to Professional Competencies

Nurlan Musazade, József Mezei, Mike Zhang


Abstract
Skill extraction and recommendation systems have been studied from recruiter, applicant, and education perspectives. While AI applications in job advertisements have received broad attention, deficiencies in the instructed skills side remain a challenge. In this work, we address the scarcity of publicly available datasets by releasing both manually annotated and synthetic datasets of skills from the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO) taxonomy and university course pairs and publishing corresponding annotation guidelines. Specifically, we match graduate-level university courses with skills from the Systems Analysts and Management and Organization Analyst ESCO occupation groups at two granularities: course title with a skill, and course sentence with a skill. We train language models on this dataset to serve as a baseline for retrieval and recommendation systems for course-to-skill and skill-to-course matching. We evaluate the models on a portion of the annotated data. Our BERT model achieves 87% F1-score, showing that course and skill matching is a feasible task.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.31
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
456–469
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-031
DOI:
10.63317/2n39qzvk2eqe
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nurlan Musazade, József Mezei, and Mike Zhang. 2026. UniSkill: A Dataset for Matching University Curricula to Professional Competencies. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 456–469, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
UniSkill: A Dataset for Matching University Curricula to Professional Competencies (Musazade et al., LREC 2026)
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