AI · regulatory retrieval and evaluation · chemicals and fire protection
Restricted From When
Ask about EU chemical restrictions in Polish, German, English or Ukrainian. Get the exact paragraph that applies on the date you choose, for your use.
Overview
REACH Annex XVII is the EU's list of restricted chemicals, and one entry can apply on different dates to different uses. Entry 82, added by Commission Regulation (EU) 2025/1988, restricts PFAS in firefighting foams. It entered into force on 23 October 2025. Its derogation for selling foam in portable fire extinguishers runs until 23 October 2026 (alcohol-resistant foams until 23 April 2027). Use for training, testing and public fire services is allowed until 23 April 2027, use in portable extinguishers until 31 December 2030, the general ban applies from 23 October 2030, and Seveso sites, offshore oil and gas, military vessels and some civilian ships have until 23 October 2035. The hard part is not finding the entry. It is "in force" against "applies from" against a transition period for one use.
We built a small answerer for that question. It reads the amending regulations from the EU Publications Office in English, German and Polish and splits them into entries, paragraphs and points, keeping the exact wording. It reads every date out of that wording, and marks each point as a ban, a derogation, an exemption or an obligation. A question in any of the four languages is matched to the paragraph that decides it. Ukrainian, which has no EU text, is matched across languages, and it is the weakest of the four: it got about half of our Ukrainian questions right, including a wrong answer to the Ukrainian version of the question in our film, which is why the film asks it in German. A rule layer then reads the date you chose: not yet in the annex, allowed until a date, derogation ended, not yet applying, or applies.
The answer is the paragraph number, its status on that date, and the paragraph's own wording in English, German and Polish. Nothing in it is paraphrased. For the kinds of question the annex never decides that we wrote rules for (fines, test methods, costs, enforcement, other countries' law), the answer says so and names where to look. We checked every indexed paragraph word for word against the EUR-Lex consolidated text of 22 June 2026. That check found corrigenda and a 2026 amendment that the original acts do not show, and the index now follows them. Consolidated texts are documentation, not the authentic legal text, and this is not legal advice.
What we built
- Ingestion of four amending regulations to REACH Annex XVII (entries 68, 78, 79 and 82) and one later amendment, Regulation (EU) 2026/1168, from the EU Publications Office (CELLAR) in EN, DE and PL. The three language versions are aligned by paragraph.
- A date model taken from the text itself: entry into force (20 days after publication), "as of", "from" and "until" dates per point, and versions of a point that apply from different dates. Point 5(c) of entry 78 changes wording on 22 June 2028.
- Cross-lingual retrieval: a multilingual embedding model (multilingual-e5-base) fused with BM25. Rules add the use (selling, using or labelling), the substance (PFHxA questions go to entry 79 before entry 82) and a scope check for questions the annex never decides.
- A word-for-word check of every paragraph against the consolidated text, with corrigenda applied.
- A question set with known answers, a development part and a held-out part that was run once, with every failure kept.
Tech stack
Python, BeautifulSoup, ONNX Runtime, multilingual-e5-base (MIT), BM25 · EU Publications Office CELLAR (REST and SPARQL)
Numbers
| Number | How we measured it |
|---|---|
| 6 of 9 held-out questions answered with the right paragraph and the right status on the date; 2 of 3 out-of-scope questions refused | 12 questions in four languages with a date and the paragraph that decides it, written by us from the OJ text, the same people who wrote the rules, while the rules were being written; not checked by a REACH specialist. Run once. Misses: alcohol-resistant foam in a portable extinguisher (Ukrainian), PFHxA in non-clothing textiles, "does entry 82 cover PFOS", and a question about certified foam brands that should have been refused. |
| 20 of 28 on the development questions (11 of 28 in our first version) | 28 dated questions in four languages, plus 4 out-of-scope ones (all 4 refused). We used them while building the method, so this is not a blind score. |
| 6 of 142 paragraphs worded differently in the consolidated text | Each paragraph's OJ wording compared with the EUR-Lex consolidated text of 22 June 2026 (EN). Five differ by corrigenda, one by Regulation (EU) 2026/1168. |
