A Benchmark for Recipe Understanding in Artificial Agents

Jens Nevens, Robin de Haes, Rachel Ringe, Mihai Pomarlan, Robert Porzel, Katrien Beuls, Paul van Eecke


Abstract
This paper introduces a novel benchmark that has been designed as a test bed for evaluating whether artificial agents are able to understand how to perform everyday activities, with a focus on the cooking domain. Understanding how to cook recipes is a highly challenging endeavour due to the underspecified and grounded nature of recipe texts, combined with the fact that recipe execution is a knowledge-intensive and precise activity. The benchmark comprises a corpus of recipes, a procedural semantic representation language of cooking actions, qualitative and quantitative kitchen simulators, and a standardised evaluation procedure. Concretely, the benchmark task consists in mapping a recipe formulated in natural language to a set of cooking actions that is precise enough to be executed in the simulated kitchen and yields the desired dish. To overcome the challenges inherent to recipe execution, this mapping process needs to incorporate reasoning over the recipe text, the state of the simulated kitchen environment, common-sense knowledge, knowledge of the cooking domain, and the action space of a virtual or robotic chef. This benchmark thereby addresses the growing interest in human-centric systems that combine natural language processing and situated reasoning to perform everyday activities.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
22–42
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.3
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jens Nevens, Robin de Haes, Rachel Ringe, Mihai Pomarlan, Robert Porzel, Katrien Beuls, and Paul van Eecke. 2024. A Benchmark for Recipe Understanding in Artificial Agents. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 22–42, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
A Benchmark for Recipe Understanding in Artificial Agents (Nevens et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.3.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2024.lrec-main.3.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip