FoodSafeSum: Enabling Natural Language Processing Applications for Food Safety Document Summarization and Analysis

Juli Bakagianni, Korbinian Randl, Guido Rocchietti, Cosimo Rulli, Franco Maria Nardini, Salvatore Trani, Aron Henriksson, Anna Romanova, John Pavlopoulos


Abstract
Food safety demands timely detection, regulation, and public communication, yet the lack of structured datasets hinders Natural Language Processing (NLP) research. We present and release a new dataset of human-written and Large Language Model (LLM)-generated summaries of food safety documents, plus food safety related metadata. We evaluate its utility on three NLP tasks directly reflecting food safety practices: multilabel classification for organizing documents into domain-specific categories; document retrieval for accessing regulatory and scientific evidence; and question answering via retrieval-augmented generation that improves factual accuracy.We show that LLM summaries perform comparably or better than human ones across tasks. We also demonstrate clustering of summaries for event tracking and compliance monitoring. This dataset enables NLP applications that support core food safety practices, including the organization of regulatory and scientific evidence, monitoring of compliance issues, and communication of risks to the public.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.911
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
16786–16804
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.911/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.911
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Juli Bakagianni, Korbinian Randl, Guido Rocchietti, Cosimo Rulli, Franco Maria Nardini, Salvatore Trani, Aron Henriksson, Anna Romanova, and John Pavlopoulos. 2025. FoodSafeSum: Enabling Natural Language Processing Applications for Food Safety Document Summarization and Analysis. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 16786–16804, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
FoodSafeSum: Enabling Natural Language Processing Applications for Food Safety Document Summarization and Analysis (Bakagianni et al., Findings 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.911.pdf
Checklist:
 2025.findings-emnlp.911.checklist.pdf