SemEval-2025 Task 9: The Food Hazard Detection Challenge

Korbinian Randl, John Pavlopoulos, Aron Henriksson, Tony Lindgren, Juli Bakagianni


Abstract
In this challenge, we explored text-based food hazard prediction with long tail distributed classes. The task was divided into two subtasks: (1) predicting whether a web text implies one of ten food-hazard categories and identifying the associated food category, and (2) providing a more fine-grained classification by assigning a specific label to both the hazard and the product. Our findings highlight that large language model-generated synthetic data can be highly effective for oversampling long-tail distributions. Furthermore, we find that fine-tuned encoder-only, encoder-decoder, and decoder-only systems achieve comparable maximum performance across both subtasks. During this challenge, we are gradually releasing (under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) a novel set of 6,644 manually labeled food-incident reports.
Anthology ID:
2025.semeval-1.325
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Sara Rosenthal, Aiala Rosá, Debanjan Ghosh, Marcos Zampieri
Venues:
SemEval | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2523–2534
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2025-08/2025.semeval-1.325/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Korbinian Randl, John Pavlopoulos, Aron Henriksson, Tony Lindgren, and Juli Bakagianni. 2025. SemEval-2025 Task 9: The Food Hazard Detection Challenge. In Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025), pages 2523–2534, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SemEval-2025 Task 9: The Food Hazard Detection Challenge (Randl et al., SemEval 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2025-08/2025.semeval-1.325.pdf