NALEF 2026 - Task 2 GastroCorp NER

Overview

The gastronomic domain presents distinctive challenges for Natural Language Processing. Terms such as arepa de choclo, ají amarillo, or tacos al pastor carry cultural identity and semantic specificity that demand precise entity recognition before downstream tasks like machine translation or recipe recommendation can be performed reliably.

GastroCorp NER 2026 is a shared task over a bilingual (Spanish–English) gastronomic corpus. Participants must assign an IOB2 entity label to tokens from restaurant menus or culinary recipes.

Organization

Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar
Cartagena, Colombia.

Task Description

Input

Whitespace-tokenized tokens in HuggingFace NER JSONL format.

Output

IOB2 labels from the following tag set:

Tag	Entity Type
DISH	Prepared food items
BEVERAGE	Drinks and final products
INGREDIENT	Individual components
BRAND	Commercial brands

Illustrative Example

Token	Tag
Pizza	B-DISH
Margarita	I-DISH
con	O
mozzarella	B-INGREDIENT
y	O
Heineken	B-BRAND

Timeline

Event	Date
Task published	March 23, 2026
Challenge opens	April 5, 2026
Development phase closes	April 25, 2026
Evaluation phase opens	April 26, 2026
Results announced	May 5, 2026
Paper submission deadline	Second week of May 2026

Quick Start

Clone and Install:

git clone https://github.com/nalef-initiative/GastroCorpNER
cd gastrocorp-ner-2026
pip install -r requirements.txt

Run Majority Baseline:

python baselines/baseline_majority.py \
    --train data/menu_train.jsonl \
    --dev   data/menu_dev.jsonl \
    --out   predictions/menu_dev_baseline.csv

Evaluate Locally:

python evaluate.py \
    --gold data/menu_dev.jsonl \
    --pred predictions/menu_dev_baseline.csv

Paper Submission

Participants are invited to submit system description papers (5–8 pages) in English using the CEURART format.

Copyright © 2026 for this paper by its authors.
Use permitted under CC BY 4.0.
NALEF 2026, Cartagena, Colombia.

Task 2: GastroCorp NER