The Impact of Named Entity Recognition on Transformer-Based Multi-Label Dietary Recipe Classification

Kemalcan Bora, Horacio Saggion


Abstract
This research explores the impact of Named Entity Recognition (NER) on transformer-based models for multi-label recipe classification by dietary preference. To support this task, we introduce the NutriCuisine Index: a collection of 23,932 recipes annotated across six dietary categories (Healthy, Vegan, Gluten-Free, Low-Carb, High-Protein, Low-Sugar). Using BERT-base-uncased, RoBERTa-base, and DistilBERT-base-uncased, we evaluate how NER-based preprocessing affects the performance (F1-score, Precision, Recall, and Hamming Loss) of Transformer-based multi-label classification models. RoBERTa-base shows significant improvements with NER in F1-score (∆F1 = +0.0147, p < 0.001), Precision, and Recall, while BERT and DistilBERT show no such gains. NER also leads to a slight but statistically significant increase in Hamming Loss across all models. These findings highlight the model dependent impact of NER on classification performance.
Anthology ID:
2025.ranlp-1.22
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era
Month:
September
Year:
2025
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Galia Angelova, Maria Kunilovskaya, Marie Escribe, Ruslan Mitkov
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Note:
Pages:
184–193
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.22/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kemalcan Bora and Horacio Saggion. 2025. The Impact of Named Entity Recognition on Transformer-Based Multi-Label Dietary Recipe Classification. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era, pages 184–193, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
Cite (Informal):
The Impact of Named Entity Recognition on Transformer-Based Multi-Label Dietary Recipe Classification (Bora & Saggion, RANLP 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.22.pdf