Bridging Cultures in the Kitchen: A Framework and Benchmark for Cross-Cultural Recipe Retrieval

Tianyi Hu, Maria Maistro, Daniel Hershcovich


Abstract
The cross-cultural adaptation of recipes is an important application of identifying and bridging cultural differences in language. The challenge lies in retaining the essence of the original recipe while also aligning with the writing and dietary habits of the target culture. Information Retrieval (IR) offers a way to address the challenge because it retrieves results from the culinary practices of the target culture while maintaining relevance to the original recipe. We introduce a novel task about cross-cultural recipe retrieval and present a unique Chinese-English cross-cultural recipe retrieval benchmark. Our benchmark is manually annotated under limited resource, utilizing various retrieval models to generate a pool of candidate results for manual annotation. The dataset provides retrieval samples that are culturally adapted but textually diverse, presenting greater challenges. We propose CARROT, a plug-and-play cultural-aware recipe information retrieval framework that incorporates cultural-aware query rewriting and re-ranking methods and evaluate it both on our benchmark and intuitive human judgments. The results show that our framework significantly enhances the preservation of the original recipe and its cultural appropriateness for the target culture. We believe these insights will significantly contribute to future research on cultural adaptation.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.61
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1068–1080
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.61/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.61
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tianyi Hu, Maria Maistro, and Daniel Hershcovich. 2024. Bridging Cultures in the Kitchen: A Framework and Benchmark for Cross-Cultural Recipe Retrieval. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1068–1080, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Bridging Cultures in the Kitchen: A Framework and Benchmark for Cross-Cultural Recipe Retrieval (Hu et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.61.pdf
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