Melania Borit

Legal Requirements for Food Traceability in the European Union

As a consequence of the multiple food scandals in Europe during the last two decades of the 20th Century, such as the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease) and the dioxin contamination of chicken feed in Belgium, the European Commission drew the first rules requiring the implementation of traceability in food chains at the Union level. This chapter looks closer at how the European Union body of law related to food traceability came into being, what the legal text entails, what are the consequences of this text, and if the approach of the legislature is consistent throughout the legal norms.

Bootstrapping a Semantic Lexicon on Verb Similarities

We present a bootstrapping algorithm to create a semantic lexicon from a list of seed words and a corpus that was mined from the web. We exploit extraction patterns to bootstrap the lexicon and use collocation statistics to dynamically score new lexicon entries. Extraction patterns are subsequently scored by calculating the conditional probability in relation to a non-related text corpus. We find that verbs that are highly domain related achieved the highest accuracy and collocation statistics affect the accuracy positively and negatively during the bootstrapping runs.