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<Paper uid="A97-1040">
  <Title>Multilingual Generation and Summarization of Job Adverts: the TREE Project</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="269" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
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    <Paragraph position="0"> Free movement of labour across national boundaries is an important aim of the European Union. 1 One of the prerequisites for this open labour market is accessibility of information about employment opportunities, both from the point of view of people seeking work, and of their potential employers. However, many EU citizens are denied full access to employment opportunities because information may not be readily available, and even where it is, it may not be available in the right language. The TREE project aims to address this problem by providing a system on the Internet where employers can deposit job ads, and which users can browse, each in their own language. Access to this service will be either through the user's own Internet provider, or at dedicated terminals located in employment centres. There are currently very many Interact sites where jobs are advertised, and indeed using information retrieval 1TREE is Language Engineering project LE 1182 of the European Commission's Fourth Framework Programme. We would like to express our thanks to other partners on the project: Edy Geerts and Marianne Kamoen (VDAB, Vlaamse Dienst voor Arbeidsbemiddeling en Beroepsopleiding), Mick Riley (Newcastle upon Tyne City Council), and Teresa Paskiewicz and Mark Stairmand (UMIST). The URL for the project's web site is http ://www.mari. co. uk/tree/.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> techniques next to natural language processing to search job offer databases is not a new application, cf. (Vega, 1990; Caldwell &amp; Korelsky, 1994). But no other application - as far as we can discover offers the opportunity of searching and of getting summaries of job ads in languages other than that of the original announcement.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> TREE therefore offers two significant services: intelligent search and summarization on the one hand, and these independent of the original language of the job ad on the other. It could be argued that the latter at least could be achieved by hooking a commercial Machine Translation (MT) system up to an Internet employment service. Although MT has had some success on the Internet (Flanagan, 1996), this is with largely sympathetic users who understand well the limitations of MT. Its use for a more delicate task aimed at the general public, especially a public which is not necessarily highly educated, is certainly out of the question, for well known reasons which we need not explore here. Suffice to say that an experiment in Canada using an MT system for precisely this application (Murray, 1989) was far from successful.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> It is also apparent that for many jobs in a loca-tion where a different language is spoken, sufficient linguistic knowledge at least to read an ad for a job in that region would be one of the prerequisites of the job: this is certainly the case for the kind of professional positions often advertised on the Internet. Nevertheless, our system offers users the possibility of searching in their own language for jobs advertised in a variety of languages. Also, there is a significant workforce for which foreign-language skills are not a prerequisite for working abroad, and which, furthermore, has traditionally been one of the most mobile: seasonal semi- and unskilled workers. For this reason, the domain we have chosen for the prototype development of the TREE project is the hotel and catering industry.</Paragraph>
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