Knowledge Augmentation Enhances Token Classification for Recipe Understanding

Nuhu Ibrahim, Robert Stevens, Riza Batista-Navarro


Abstract
In this work, we propose an entity type-specific and knowledge-augmented token classification framework designed to improve encoder models’ performance on recipe texts. Our empirical analysis shows that this approach achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on 5 out of 7 benchmark recipe datasets, significantly outperforming traditional token classification methods. We introduce a novel methodology leveraging curated domain-specific knowledge contexts to guide encoder models such as BERT and RoBERTa, which we refer to as RecipeBERT-KA and RecipeRoBERTa-KA. Additionally, we release a newly reprocessed entity type-specific and knowledge-enriched dataset that merges seven widely used food datasets, making it the largest annotated food-related dataset to date. Comparative analysis with SOTA large language models (GPT-4o, Mistral-7B, LLaMA 3-13B and LLaMA 3-70B) highlights the practical advantages of our smaller and specialised models. Finally, we analyse the impact of the different knowledge contexts, our models’ potential for transfer learning, the effect of combining the datasets and scenarios where traditional token classification may still perform competitively, offering nuanced insight into method selection.
Anthology ID:
2026.eacl-long.127
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Vera Demberg, Kentaro Inui, Lluís Marquez
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2776–2788
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-long.127/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nuhu Ibrahim, Robert Stevens, and Riza Batista-Navarro. 2026. Knowledge Augmentation Enhances Token Classification for Recipe Understanding. In Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2776–2788, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Knowledge Augmentation Enhances Token Classification for Recipe Understanding (Ibrahim et al., EACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-long.127.pdf