Ultimately Upwork needs to solve one problem: match employers to employees. The particulars of the match change with the intent of the user and the nature of the job. For example, algorithms used to match clients to freelancers differ from the algorithms used to help freelancers find jobs. …

In other posts I discussed how we select prospective terms in freelancer profiles and job postings, then establish parent-child (subsume) relations (part1, part2, part3). Discovering term similarity is the next step we implemented in Upwork’s automatic ontology update. We choose the approach proposed by [1] as a basis for our…

Toolkits And SDKs Programming Language In the previous posts (part 1, part 2) I discussed doing NLP (Natural Language Processing) on Upwork’s set of user profiles and job posts for automated ontology generation. Here I’ll talk about software we used, quirks we found there, rocks we stumbled upon. We decided to implement…

In the previous post (link) , I have discussed a process for automatic ontology generation. In this post, I will write about the results of applying the process to Upwork’s set of active freelancer profiles.I’ll write yet another post talking about software we used and discussing various implementation issues. …

As I have written before, Upwork uses ontology in many places on the website, including semantic search, browse paths, SEO and a few others. We used to generate ontology graphs manually. A team of ontologists created curated taxonomies for different categories, creating more or less occupation-specific hierarchies. While that approach…

Continuing the posts about building components of modern search in my last post, I wrote about ontology. Now, I’d like to discuss why we would even need to know about changes in ontology. Seems like if something was connected to an ontology node and that node moved, or got soft…

Let’s begin by defining what a platform is. That’s a very popular word in a company’s lexicon. It’s used (and abused) by any number of people and so made to mean different things, depending on the speaker. Today I’ll talk about software platforms: a set of software components that can…

While most tools available on the Internet have good documentation, I stumbled upon this quagmire and hope someone will benefit from my experience. I’m a complete noob in IntelliJ Idea and Gradle. For many years I was an Eclipse and straight Ant guy, with a little Maven when it was…

It’s the time to be jolly and write performance reviews. Every year we get told that we’ll have to write no more than some really small number of reviews. I swear, sometimes I feel like some people have never seen an org chart, much less a social graph. If there…