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Semantic Nutrition Estimation: Predicting Food Healthfulness from Text Descriptions

Dayne R. Freudenberg, Daniel G. Haughian, Mitchell A. Klusty, Caroline N. Leach, W. Scott Black, Leslie N. Woltenberg, Rowan Hallock, Elizabeth Solie, Emily B. Collier, Samuel E. Armstrong, V. K. Cody Bumgardner

Details

Journal arXiv preprint
Year 2025
Categories cs.LG, cs.AI
Note 10 pages, 4 figures, 6 tables, submitted to AMIA 2026 Informatics Summit

Abstract

Accurate nutritional assessment is critical for public health, but existing profiling systems require detailed data often unavailable or inaccessible from colloquial text descriptions of food. This paper presents a machine learning pipeline that predicts the comprehensive Food Compass Score 2.0 (FCS) from text descriptions. Our approach uses multi-headed neural networks to process hybrid feature vectors combining semantic embeddings, lexical features, and domain-specific heuristics.

10 pages, 4 figures, 6 tables, submitted to AMIA 2026 Informatics Summit