# FoodSEM: Large Language Model Specialized in Food Named-Entity Linking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22125 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22125/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08746/) (2019)
- [An Empirical Study of Catastrophic Forgetting in Large Language Models During Continual Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08747/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Evaluation of LLMs in retrieving food and nutritional context for RAG systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09704/) (2026)
- [Beyond Fine-Tuning: Robust Food Entity Linking under Ontology Drift with FoodOntoRAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09758/) (2026)
- [KARAMEL: Knowledge-Aware Ranking for Multimodal Entity Linking in the Arts via Heterogeneous Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16502/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces FoodSEM, a state-of-the-art fine-tuned open-source large language model (LLM) for named-entity linking (NEL) to food-related ontologies. To the best of our knowledge, food NEL is a task that cannot be accurately solved by state-of-the-art general-purpose (large) language models or custom domain-specific models/systems. Through an instruction-response (IR) scenario, FoodSEM links food-related entities mentioned in a text to several ontologies, including FoodOn, SNOMED-CT, and the Hansard taxonomy. The FoodSEM model achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to related models/systems, with F1 scores even reaching 98% on some ontologies and datasets. The presented comparative analyses against zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot LLM prompting baselines further highlight FoodSEM's superior performance over its non-fine-tuned version. By making FoodSEM and its related resources publicly available, the main contributions of this article include (1) publishing a food-annotated corpora into an IR format suitable for LLM fine-tuning/evaluation, (2) publishing a robust model to advance the semantic understanding of text in the food domain, and (3) providing a strong baseline on food NEL for future benchmarking.