  This paper introduces a new tool, OccCANINE, to automatically transform
occupational descriptions into the HISCO classification system. The manual work
involved in processing and classifying occupational descriptions is
error-prone, tedious, and time-consuming. We finetune a preexisting language
model (CANINE) to do this automatically, thereby performing in seconds and
minutes what previously took days and weeks. The model is trained on 14 million
pairs of occupational descriptions and HISCO codes in 13 different languages
contributed by 22 different sources. Our approach is shown to have accuracy,
recall, and precision above 90 percent. Our tool breaks the metaphorical HISCO
barrier and makes this data readily available for analysis of occupational
structures with broad applicability in economics, economic history, and various
related disciplines.
