title: Monitoring food safety violation reports from internet forums.
abstract: Food-borne illness is a growing public health concern in the world. Government bodies, which regulate and monitor the state of food safety, solicit citizen feedback about food hygiene practices followed by food establishments. They use traditional channels like call center, e-mail for such feedback collection. With the growing popularity of Web 2.0 and social media, citizens often post such feedback on internet forums, message boards etc. The system proposed in this paper applies text mining techniques to identify and mine such food safety complaints posted by citizens on web data sources thereby enabling the government agencies to gather more information about the state of food safety. In this paper, we discuss the architecture of our system and the text mining methods used. We also present results which demonstrate the effectiveness of this system in a real-world deployment.
authors.affiliation: IBM Research Collaboratory, Singapore.
authors.forename: Kiran
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kate
authors.affiliation: IBM Research India, New Delhi.
authors.forename: Sumit
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Negi
authors.affiliation: IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, USA.
authors.forename: Jayant
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kalagnanam
mesh_terms: D054626:Consumer Health Information / Q000145:classification / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D057225:Data Mining / Q000379:methods*; D059022:Food Safety / Q000379:methods*; D005517:Foodborne Diseases / Q000453:epidemiology*; D064088:Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D062486:Public Health Surveillance / Q000379:methods*; D061108:Social Media / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D060756:Social Networking