Studying food recipes is indispensable to understand the science of cooking. An essential problem in food computing is the adaptation of recipes to user needs and preferences. The main difficulty when adapting recipes is in determining ingredients relations, which are compound and hard to interpret. Word embedding models can catch the semantics of food items in a recipe, helping to understand how ingredients are combined and substituted. In this work, we propose an unsupervised method for adapting ingredient recipes to user preferences. To learn food representations and relations, we create and apply a specific-domain word embedding model. In contrast to previous works, we not only use the list of ingredients to train the model but also the cooking instructions. We enrich the ingredient data by mapping them to a nutrition database to guide the adaptation and find ingredient substitutes. We performed three different kinds of recipe adaptation based on nutrition preferences, adapting to similar ingredients, and vegetarian and vegan diet restrictions. With a 95% of confidence, our method can obtain quality adapted recipes without a previous knowledge extraction on the recipe adaptation domain. Our results confirm the potential of using a specific-domain semantic model to tackle the recipe adaptation task.

This paper presents AdaptaFood, a system to adapt recipes to specific dietary constraints. This is a common societal issue due to various dietary needs arising from medical conditions, allergies, or nutritional preferences. AdaptaFood provides recipe adaptations from two inputs: a recipe image (a fine-tuned image-captioning model allows us to extract the ingredients) or a recipe object (we extract the ingredients from the recipe features). For the adaptation, we propose to use an attention-based language sentence model based on BERT to learn the semantics of the ingredients and, therefore, discover the hidden relations among them. Specifically, we use them to perform two tasks: (1) align the food items from several sources to expand recipe information; (2) use the semantic features embedded in the representation vector to detect potential food substitutes for the ingredients. The results show that the model successfully learns domain-specific knowledge after re-training it to the food computing domain. Combining this acquired knowledge with the adopted strategy for sentence representation and food replacement enables the generation of high-quality recipe versions and dealing with the heterogeneity of different-origin food data.