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As the problem of an aging population becomes more and more serious, social robots have an increasingly significant influence on human life. By employing regular question-and-answer conversations or wearable devices, some social robotics products can establish personal health archives. But those robots are unable to collect diet information automatically through robot vision or audition. A healthy diet can reduce a person's risk of developing cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and other age-related diseases. In order to automatically perceive the dietary composition of the elderly by listening to people's chatting, this paper proposed a chat-based automatic dietary composition perception algorithm (DCPA). DCPA uses social robot audition to understand the semantic information and percept dietary composition for Mandarin Chinese. Firstly, based on the Mel-frequency cepstrum coefficient and convolutional neural network, a speaker recognition method is designed to identify speech data. Based on speech segmentation and speaker recognition algorithm, an audio segment classification method is proposed to distinguish different speakers, store their identity information and the sequence of expression in a speech conversation. Secondly, a dietetic lexicon is established, and two kinds of dietary composition semantic understanding algorithms are proposed to understand the eating semantics and sensor dietary composition information. To evaluate the performance of the proposed DCPA algorithm, we implemented the proposed DCPA in our social robot platform. Then we established two categories of test datasets relating to a one-person and a multi-person chat. The test results show that DCPA is capable of understanding users' dietary compositions, with an F1 score of 0.9505, 0.8940 and 0.8768 for one-person talking, a two-person chat and a three-person chat, respectively. DCPA has good robustness for obtaining dietary information.