Back to the Future: Knowledge Light Case Base Cookery

The domain of cookery has been of interest for Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) research for many years since the CHEF case-based planning system in the mid 1980s. This paper returns to look at this domain, emphasising a knowledge-light approach. Our approach focuses on; the design of a structured case representation which encapsulates the details of a recipe, on leveraging WordNet for identifying food items and the relationships between them, and on using Active Learning to assist in labelling recipes with meal and cuisine types. Users can search for recipes by specifying the ingredients they wish to include in, or exclude from, the recipe and optionally specifying the type of meal and/or cuisine they are interested in. Recipes are retrieved based on a weighted similarity of the ingredients, the meal and/or cuisine types (if specified) and the textual similarity between the query and specific fields of the recipe text. The system includes substitution adaptation where a recipe can be recommended with a replacement ingredient, where appropriate.