Abstract: A method may include: receiving input data comprising company business descriptions, industry tags, and industry tag descriptions; creating a similarity matrix for the industry tags using a minimum labeling strategy, wherein the similarity matrix comprises a plurality of similarity scores for pairs of industry tags; sampling the industry tags using a stratified sampling method; generating a semantic textual similarity style dataset comprising triplets of the industry tag descriptions, the company business descriptions, and the similarity scores; fine-tuning a baseline language model for a semantic similarity model; training the semantic similarity model by subjecting embeddings generated for pairs of the company business description and industry tag descriptions to a cosine similarity function; creating a checkpoint model for the semantic similarity model, and inferring an industry tag for each company using the checkpoint model that generates a cosine similarity for pairs for industry tag descriptions.