KERL: Knowledge-Enhanced Personalized Recipe Recommendation using Large
  Language Models
Authors: name: Fnu Mohbat; name: Mohammed J Zaki
Published: 2025-05-20 17:19:57

Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and the abundance of food
data have resulted in studies to improve food understanding using LLMs. Despite
several recommendation systems utilizing LLMs and Knowledge Graphs (KGs), there
has been limited research on integrating food related KGs with LLMs. We
introduce KERL, a unified system that leverages food KGs and LLMs to provide
personalized food recommendations and generates recipes with associated
micro-nutritional information. Given a natural language question, KERL extracts
entities, retrieves subgraphs from the KG, which are then fed into the LLM as
context to select the recipes that satisfy the constraints. Next, our system
generates the cooking steps and nutritional information for each recipe. To
evaluate our approach, we also develop a benchmark dataset by curating recipe
related questions, combined with constraints and personal preferences. Through
extensive experiments, we show that our proposed KG-augmented LLM significantly
outperforms existing approaches, offering a complete and coherent solution for
food recommendation, recipe generation, and nutritional analysis. Our code and
benchmark datasets are publicly available at
https://github.com/mohbattharani/KERL.