A Graphical Formalism for Commonsense Reasoning with Recipes
This work addresses the need for a formal framework to enable commonsense reasoning in cooking, which is an incremental step in domain-specific AI applications.
The authors tackled the problem of formalizing recipes for computational reasoning by proposing a graphical formalism that captures ingredients, actions, and products as a labelled bipartite graph, and they developed formal definitions for comparing, composing, deconstructing, and substituting recipes.
Whilst cooking is a very important human activity, there has been little consideration given to how we can formalize recipes for use in a reasoning framework. We address this need by proposing a graphical formalization that captures the comestibles (ingredients, intermediate food items, and final products), and the actions on comestibles in the form of a labelled bipartite graph. We then propose formal definitions for comparing recipes, for composing recipes from subrecipes, and for deconstructing recipes into subrecipes. We also introduce and compare two formal definitions for substitution into recipes which are required when there are missing ingredients, or some actions are not possible, or because there is a need to change the final product somehow.