CICL at SemEval-2025 Task 9: A Pilot Study on Different Machine Learning Models for Food Hazard Detection Challenge

AbstractThis paper describes our approaches to SemEval-2025 task 9, a multiclass classification task to detect food hazards and affected products, given food incident reports from web resources. The training data consists of the date of the incidents and the text of the incident reports, as well as the labels: “hazard-category” and “product-category” for task 1, “hazard” and “product” for task 2. We primarily focused on solving task 1 of this challenge. Our approach is in two directions: Firstly, we fine-tuned BERT-based models (BERT and ModernBERT); secondly, in addition to BERT-based models, linearSVC, random forest classifier, and LightGBM were also used to tackle the challenge. From the experiment, we have learned that BERT-based models outperformed the other models mentioned above, and applying focal loss to BERT-based models optimized their performance on imbalanced classification tasks.