FoodBench-QA: Overview of the Shared Task on Grounded Food and Nutrition Question Answering

Tome Eftimov, Ana Gjorgjevikj, Matej Martinc, Gjorgjina Cenikj, Sašo Džeroski, Barbara Koroušič Seljak


Abstract
We present the results of the FoodBench-QA 2026 shared task at the CL4Health workshop, collocated with LREC 2026. FoodBench-QA challenges systems to answer food and nutrition questions using evidence from food composition databases and food-related ontologies. The shared task comprises three main tasks: nutrient estimation from recipe ingredients, evaluated using EU Regulation 1169/2011 tolerance thresholds; FSA traffic-light classification for fat, salt, saturates, and sugars; and food named entity recognition and linking to three ontologies, namely Hansard Taxonomy, FoodOn, and SNOMED CT. We received submissions from five participating teams across all tasks. For nutrient estimation, the best system achieved accuracy rates of 93.57% for protein, 86.50% for sugars, 84.65% for fat, and 86.26% for saturates. For FSA traffic-light prediction, the best macro F1 scores ranged from 0.65 to 0.90 across different nutrient-color combinations. For named entity linking, the best systems achieved macro F1 scores between 60.71% and 80.89% for natural text and 87.75% and 95.75% for artificial NEL datasets, depending on the ontology.
Anthology ID:
2026.cl4health-1.20
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Patient-Oriented Language Processing (CL4Health) @ LREC 2026
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Deepak Gupta, Paul Thompson, Sophia Ananiadou, Dina Demner-Fushman
Venues:
CL4Health | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
223–233
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-cl4health-20
DOI:
10.63317/3mtt98s2wcu7
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tome Eftimov, Ana Gjorgjevikj, Matej Martinc, Gjorgjina Cenikj, Sašo Džeroski, and Barbara Koroušič Seljak. 2026. FoodBench-QA: Overview of the Shared Task on Grounded Food and Nutrition Question Answering. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Patient-Oriented Language Processing (CL4Health) @ LREC 2026, pages 223–233, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
FoodBench-QA: Overview of the Shared Task on Grounded Food and Nutrition Question Answering (Eftimov et al., CL4Health 2026)
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