DietNerd: A Nutrition Question-Answering System That Summarizes and Evaluates Peer-Reviewed Scientific Articles
Shela Wu, Zubair Yacub, Dennis E. Shasha · Applied Sciences · 2024
DietNerd is a large language model-based system designed to enhance public health education in diet and nutrition. The system responds to user questions with concise, evidence-based summaries and assesses the quality and potential biases of cited research. This paper describes the system’s workflow, back-end implementation, and the prompts used. Accuracy and quality-of-response results are presented based on an automated comparison against systematic surveys and against the responses of similar state-of-the-art systems through human feedback from registered dietitians. DietNerd is among the highest-evaluated of these systems and is unique in combining safety features with sophisticated source analysis. Thus, DietNerd could be a tool to bridge the gap between complex scientific literature and public understanding.