Quantifying Hidden Salt for Precision Healthcare: Sodium Assessment via Joint-Factor Retrieval and Chain-of-Thought Inference

Mingyu Huang, Weiqing Min, Yuehui Fang, Yuna He, Shuqiang Jiang


Abstract
Precision healthcare, particularly for conditions like hypertension and cardiovascular disease, necessitates monitoring of dietary sodium intake. However, tracking this is hindered by the prevalence of hidden salt in cooking, such as sodium in soy sauce and ketchup. While recipes offer a valuable data source for dietary analysis, sodium-rich seasonings are frequently omitted or described ambiguously in instructions. To solve this issue, we propose SALT, a Sodium Assessing Level Tracking framework adopting an RAG framework to assess sodium content in recipes. Our framework first introduces a Joint-Factor Embedding Retrieval module to locate similar recipes with specified sodium content for addressing the lack of contextual references. These retrieved samples provide contexts for subsequent inference. Then we design a structured 4-hop Chain-of-Thought inference module to refine the vague estimation from language models through a multi-step sodium estimation. To facilitate our study, we further construct a recipe dataset SALT54k with 54,151 entries labeled with 11 sodium quantities across common seasonings. Results on SALT54k demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in sodium estimation. Additional real-world validations confirm the effectiveness of our method, demonstrating its potential as a practical solution for AI-assisted precision healthcare.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.686
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
15789–15804
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.686/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Mingyu Huang, Weiqing Min, Yuehui Fang, Yuna He, and Shuqiang Jiang. 2026. Quantifying Hidden Salt for Precision Healthcare: Sodium Assessment via Joint-Factor Retrieval and Chain-of-Thought Inference. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 15789–15804, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Quantifying Hidden Salt for Precision Healthcare: Sodium Assessment via Joint-Factor Retrieval and Chain-of-Thought Inference (Huang et al., EMNLP 2026)
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https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.686.pdf