IndoNutriQA: An Indonesian Clinical Nutrition Question Answering Benchmark
Organizations: Universitas Brawijaya · Universitas Ma Chung · MBZUAI
Abstract
Clinical Question Answering (QA) underpins Clinical Intelligent Decision Support Systems, but progress is severely limited for low-resource languages such as Indonesian by the absence of public domain-specific data. We introduce IndoNutriQA, an expert-curated Indonesian clinical QA benchmark of 911 question-answer pairs built from real clinical-nutrition reports. Rather than a large-scale training corpus, it is positioned as a high-quality evaluation resource: every pair is grounded in a clinically relevant context, enriched with structured metadata (anthropometric assessment, medical diagnosis, document provenance, chunk segmentation). Eight standardised question types following the Nutrition Care Process (NCP), including the Problem, Etiology, Sign and Symptom (PES) diagnosis statement, are answered for every report, which was written by a graduate-level dietetic intern, by one of three nutritionists. Answers are free-form clinical prose rather than extractive spans, and an expert validation study finds 6-10% of reference answers contestable. The dataset supports generative, extractive and retrieval-augmented QA as well as zero- and few-shot LLM evaluation. We report fine-tuned baselines (IndoBERT variants, mT5, RAG) with 5-fold cross-validation, learning curves and bootstrap 95% confidence intervals, and benchmark eight contemporary LLMs zero- and five-shot. We further calibrate our LLM-as-judge rubric against three expert raters (one RD, two nutritionists), finding it human-comparable on factuality and completeness but unreliable on clinical safety, and a human error analysis shows it misses unsupported content that the raters identify. IndoNutriQA is released to foster research in Indonesian clinical NLP and nutritional decision support.
Figures & tables
| 1. Screening method | 5. Dietary goals |
| 2. Nutritional status | 6. Dietary principles |
| 3. Abnormal biochemistry | 7. Dietary requirements |
| 4. PES nutrition diagnosis | 8. Dietary guidelines |
| Model | Family | Shots | EM | F1 | BLEU | R-1 | R-2 | R-L |
| Fine-tuned baselines (this work) | ||||||||
| Rifky_IndoBERT_QA | IndoBERT (extr.) | – | 12.41 | 36.34 | 12.93 | 37.28 | 34.31 | 36.72 |
| IndoLEM_IndoBERT | IndoBERT (extr.) | – | 5.84 | 23.78 | 10.60 | 24.44 | 22.87 | 24.17 |
| Cahya_IndoBERT | IndoBERT (extr.) | – | 4.38 | 16.56 | 6.14 | 17.02 | 16.01 | 16.92 |
| XLM-R-large | XLM-R (extr.) | – | 1.46 | 12.60 | 8.62 | 12.62 | 11.45 | 12.45 |
| mDeBERTa-v3-base | mDeBERTa (extr.) | – | 5.84 | 19.35 | 14.03 | 19.51 | 18.28 | 19.19 |
Appendix figures & tables21 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Metric | Value |
| Total QA Pairs | 911 |
| Total Source Reports | 120 |
| Average Question Length | 8.32 tokens |
| Average Answer Length | 70.66 tokens |
| Average Context Length | 131.28 tokens |
| Unique Medical Diagnoses | 128 |
| Model | F1 % [95% CI] |
| Fine-tuned baselines | |
| Rifky_IndoBERT_QA | 36.34 [29.03, 43.59] |
| IndoLEM_IndoBERT | 23.78 [17.48, 29.75] |
| Cahya_IndoBERT | 16.56 [11.20, 21.96] |
| XLM-R-large | 12.60 [ 8.05, 17.26] |
| mDeBERTa-v3-base | 19.35 [13.34, 25.42] |
| Model | EM (%) | F1 (%) | ROUGE-L (%) |
| Rifky_IndoBERT_QA | 10.20 1.37 | 32.62 1.29 | 33.23 1.62 |
| IndoLEM_IndoBERT | 5.59 1.62 | 21.69 2.37 | 22.25 2.53 |
| Cahya_IndoBERT | 5.70 0.94 | 23.75 2.65 | 24.40 3.04 |
| mT5 (Generative) | 0.00 0.00 | 6.60 2.66 | 5.66 2.30 |
| Benchmark | Indo. | Nutr. | Clin. docs |
| SQuAD | – | – | – |
| TyDi QA | – | – | |
| PubMedQA | – | – | – |
| MedQA | – | – | – |
| MedMCQA | – | – | – |
| MedQuAD | – | – | – |
| Dataset | Language | Domain | # Samples | Q Type | A Type | Source | Avg Q Length | Avg A Length |
| MedQA (USMLE) Jin et al. (2021) | EN | General Med | 12,723 | MCQ | Single | Exam | 116.6 tokens | 3.5 tokens |
| MedQA (MCMLE) Jin et al. (2021) | ZH | General Med | 34,251 | MCQ | Single | Exam | 45.7 chars | 7.3 chars |
| MedQA (TWMLE) Jin et al. (2021) | ZH | General Med | 14,123 | MCQ | Single | Exam | 61.0 chars | 20.6 chars |
| MedMCQA Pal et al. (2022) | EN | General Med | 194,000+ | MCQ | Single | Exam | 12.71 tokens | 2.70 tokens |
| PubMedQA (PQA-L) Jin et al. (2019) | EN | Biomedical | 1,000+ | Y/N/Maybe | Short | Literature | 14.4 tokens | 43.2 tokens |
| PubMedQA (PQA-U) Jin et al. (2019) | EN | Biomedical | 61,200+ | Y/N/Maybe | Short | Literature | 15.0 tokens | 45.9 tokens |
| Metric | Score % [95% CI] |
| Generator-side | |
| Faithfulness ( ) | 12.86 [–, –] |
| Answer relevancy | 0.24 [ 0.00, 0.60] |
| Retriever-side | |
| Context precision | 73.43 [66.85, 80.23] |
| Context recall | 35.98 [29.61, 42.86] |
| Model | Lexical F1 | BERTScore F1 | Embed. cos | Judge fact. | Judge compl. | Judge safety | Judge overall |
| Fine-tuned baselines | |||||||
| Rifky_IndoBERT_QA | 36.34 | 45.94 [38.41, 54.07] | 45.27 [39.31, 51.74] | 3.14 [2.84, 3.45] | 2.84 [2.53, 3.13] | 4.89 [4.80, 4.96] | 3.62 [3.43, 3.83] |
| IndoLEM_IndoBERT | 23.78 | 35.42 [27.87, 42.57] | 36.23 [30.51, 41.84] | 2.61 [2.34, 2.91] | 2.33 [2.07, 2.60] | 4.85 [4.77, 4.92] | 3.26 [3.09, 3.45] |
| Cahya_IndoBERT | 16.56 | 25.78 [19.24, 32.26] | 28.61 [23.64, 33.79] | 2.46 [2.18, 2.75] | 2.19 [1.93, 2.45] | 4.85 [4.77, 4.92] | 3.17 [2.99, 3.36] |
| XLM-R-large | 12.60 | 23.16 [16.74, 29.64] | 27.61 [23.02, 32.62] | 2.34 [2.05, 2.64] | 2.12 [1.88, 2.38] | 4.84 [4.75, 4.92] | 3.10 [2.92, 3.29] |
| mDeBERTa-v3-base | 19.35 | 28.47 [21.53, 35.90] | 32.18 [26.71, 38.05] | 2.54 [2.28, 2.83] | 2.32 [2.07, 2.59] | 4.89 [4.82, 4.94] | 3.25 [3.08, 3.44] |
| Dimension | Quadratic | Within-1 pt. | Mean abs. diff. |
| Factuality | 0.584 | 83.3% | 0.77 |
| Completeness | 0.711 | 84.6% | 0.71 |
| Safety | 0.251 | 80.7% | 0.66 |
| Pooled (all dims) | 0.652 | 82.8% | 0.71 |
| Model | Judge fact. | Judge compl. | Judge safety | Judge overall |
| Fine-tuned baselines | ||||
| Rifky_IndoBERT_QA | 3.98 [3.68, 4.29] | 2.93 [2.60, 3.26] | 4.28 [4.02, 4.53] | 3.73 [3.46, 3.98] |
| IndoLEM_IndoBERT | 3.80 [3.49, 4.10] | 2.35 [2.05, 2.66] | 4.17 [3.93, 4.41] | 3.44 [3.20, 3.68] |
| Cahya_IndoBERT | 3.85 [3.52, 4.18] | 2.23 [1.90, 2.57] | 4.21 [3.93, 4.45] | 3.43 [3.14, 3.69] |
| XLM-R-large | 3.81 [3.51, 4.12] | 1.96 [1.69, 2.29] | 4.12 [3.86, 4.38] | 3.30 [3.07, 3.55] |
| mDeBERTa-v3-base | 3.87 [3.58, 4.17] | 2.20 [1.88, 2.54] | 4.18 [3.93, 4.42] | 3.42 [3.18, 3.65] |
| Fact. | Compl. | Safety | |
| Inter-rater ( ) | |||
| Quadratic | |||
| Krippendorff | |||
| Judge vs rater consensus (quadratic ) | |||
| GPT-4o-mini | |||
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | |||
| Mean judge gap | ||||
| Dimension | Same prov. | Other | DiD | |
| ( ) | ( ) | |||
| Factuality | ||||
| Completeness | ||||
| Safety | ||||
| Overall | ||||
| Units | Mean rater score | ||||
| Human error category | % | Fact. | Compl. | Safe. | |
| Omission | |||||
| Non-answer / truncated | |||||
| NCP/PES violation | |||||
| Reference itself wrong | |||||
| Unsupported addition | |||||
| Model | Factual ( ) | Inferential ( ) | Recommendation ( ) |
| Fine-tuned baselines | |||
| Rifky_IndoBERT_QA | 12.78 | 29.80 | 55.51 |
| IndoLEM_IndoBERT | 5.07 | 17.18 | 39.92 |
| Cahya_IndoBERT | 2.55 | 3.55 | 33.89 |
| XLM-R-large | 2.09 | 4.43 | 24.56 |
| mDeBERTa-v3-base | 3.07 | 6.05 | 38.30 |
| Model | Resp. ( ) | Gastro. ( ) | Neuro. ( ) | Hem./Onc. ( ) | Nutr./Gr. ( ) | Infect. ( ) | ENT ( ) |
| Fine-tuned baselines | |||||||
| Rifky_IndoBERT_QA | 35.71 | 41.96 | 31.83 | 34.23 | 23.77 | 41.15 | 48.91 |
| IndoLEM_IndoBERT | 24.51 | 26.76 | 27.48 | 18.78 | 5.71 | 13.65 | 38.57 |
| Cahya_IndoBERT | 18.37 | 18.72 | 9.35 | 13.89 | 8.37 | 27.27 | 29.00 |
| XLM-R-large | 13.77 | 19.83 | 4.87 | 10.67 | 2.09 | 16.54 | 17.85 |
| mDeBERTa-v3-base | 20.22 | 19.40 | 23.29 | 13.32 | 0.68 | 16.53 | 40.24 |
| Model | Correct | Partial | Wrong span | Term. mismatch | Hallucination | Noise |
| Fine-tuned baselines | ||||||
| Rifky_IndoBERT_QA | 32.0 | 14.0 | 0.0 | 2.0 | 0.0 | 52.0 |
| XLM-R-large | 10.0 | 14.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 76.0 |
| mDeBERTa-v3-base | 12.0 | 16.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 72.0 |
| Closed-source LLM (5-shot) | ||||||
| GPT-4o-mini | 30.0 | 70.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| Disease category | Source reports | QA pairs | ||
| % | % | |||
| Respiratory | ||||
| Infectious | ||||
| Gastrointestinal | ||||
| Nutrition/growth | ||||
| Neurologic | ||||
Clinical QA
Clinical question answering uses AI to answer medical and patient-specific questions from clinical knowledge, records, guidelines, and evidence.
See all 63 papers