Making social labour contracts more accessible with natural language processing.

Making 900+ social labour contracts more accessible with natural language processing. THE CHALLENGE The Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment is responsible for more than 900 collective labour agreements (CAOs), covering more than 6 million employees in the Netherlands. These CAOs need to be kept up to date (aligned with any changes in the law) and information needs to be retrieved from these documents on a regular basis. ‍ The current process of analysing and information retrieval from CAO’s is largely manual and very labour intensive. The Ministry wanted to find a way to automate this process and make it more accurate, freeing up time from the Ministry specialists, enabling them to focus on more strategic tasks. THE OUTCOME We applied natural language processing to automate and augment the existing labour intensive process of searching and analysing collective labour agreements. ‍ This allows staff to focus on the more rewarding aspects of the task at hand, and at the same time increasing overall accuracy.