WISS 2022

ReciPic: A Tool for Generating Infographic from Recipe Procedure
Text
Lechang Zhang∗

Itoh Takayuki†

Abstract.
In this paper, we propose a tool for generating infographic from recipe procedure text,to supplement the pure text information on the recipe websites. This tool accepts one step text of thecooking procedures, and then separate the text stream into appropriate units. After that, it extracts
the food material, cooking tool, cooking action segmentations and label them with F, T, Ac (F: Foodmaterial, T: Cooking tool, Ac: Cooking action) respectively by users. Finally, it matches the words withprepared pictures and place them with appropriate positions in an infographic and represents it to users.

1Introduction

In recent years, more and more people choose
to use recipe websites to look for recipes, cooking
advices or to share their own cooking ideas. The
most popular recipe websites in Japan is Cookpad, which has over 50 million monthly users
in Japan, and an additional 42 million monthly
users across 74 countries, with 3 million recipes.
In order to support such a large user community
and improve their using satisfaction, it is necessary to analyze the recipes in recipe websites.
A recipe in recipe websites simply contains
the recipe name, ingredients, and cooking procedures. Among these components, cooking procedure is the key part that users will follow. However, they are often displayed by pure text inthe websites. It is diﬃcult for users to grasp
the valuable information and have a big picture
about the food materials and cooking methods
at a glance.
In this paper, we propose ReciPic, an interactive visualization tool to make the cooking procedure text more understandable. Our tool allowsusers to enter recipe procedure step text, andthen transforms it into the corresponding infographic.

Copyright is held by the author(s). This paper is nonrefereed and non-archival. Hence it may later appear
in any journals, conferences, symposia, etc.
∗Ochanomizu University†
Ochanomizu University

2Method

2.1 Outline
Our research developed a tool called ReciPic,
which is a web application that allows users toenter recipe procedure step text, then perform
word segmentation on the text and return theuseful information that we use to generate infographic. Next, we ask users to edit the information to improve the accuracy of generating
infographic. Finally, we generate the infographic
and present it to users.
2.2 Text analysis
In order to generate infographic from the input recipe procedure step text, we ﬁrst analyze
the input text and segment the text into usefulparts. There are two popular Japanese text analysis tools. One is called kytea and the other iscalled mecab. We chose mecab for the following
reasons.
• Mecab has a dictionary called mecab-ipadicNEologd that is constantly updated, while
kytea has not been updated for many years.
• Mecab can be used by python, while kytea
can only be used in terminal.
A text analysis result is shown below:
Input: 鍋に水、本だし、料理酒、みりん、濃口醤
油、上白糖を入れて、手羽元を入れて強火にかける.
(Put water, hondashi, cooking sake, sweet sake,dark soy sauce, caster sugar and the chicken wings
in the pot, and set the strong ﬁre.).
Output: 鍋 (pot) 水 (water) 本だし (hondashi)
料理酒 (cooking sake) みりん (sweet sake) 濃口
醤油 (dark soy sauce) 上白糖 (caster sugar) 入WISS 2022

れ (put) 手羽元 (chicken wings) 入れ (put) 強火(strong ﬁre) かける (set)

2.3 User modiﬁcation
After text analysis, we classify the segmented
words into appropriate categories in order to make
ReciPic have a rough understanding of them.
The recipe terms deﬁnition is shown in Table
1. We ask the users to label the result with theTable 1. Recipe terms deﬁnition.

Recipe term
Food
Tool
Action of chef

TagFTAc

Examplesegg, rice
fry pan, rice cooker
put, cutrecipe tags.
After text analysis, we also lost the relationships between words. e.g. 水 (water), 本だし(hondashi), 料理酒 (cooking sake), みりん (sweetsake), 濃口醤油 (dark soy sauce), 上白糖 (castersugar) and 手羽元 (chicken wings) is related totool 鍋 (pot) and action 入れ (put). Therefore,
we ask users to mark the word relationships, thedetailed steps are as follows:• Mark the tools and actions with their tagand occurrence order.
• Mark the food with its related tools andactions.
The result is shown below:
User modiﬁcation: 鍋/T/T0 水/F/T0Ac0 本だ
し/F/T0Ac0 料理酒/F/T0Ac0 みりん/F/T0Ac0
濃口醤油/F/T0Ac0 上白糖/F/T0Ac0 入れ/Ac/Ac0
手羽元/F/T0Ac1 入れ/Ac/Ac1 強火/T/T1 かける/Ac/Ac2
Then we ask the user to submit the result.
2.4 Infographic generating
In order to generate the infographics, we prepared an image database which contains the illustrations of food and tools. The database consists of two collections, one is food, and the otheris tool. In each collection, it contains diﬀerent
objects that have two properties ― name andimage address ― to indicate the name and image of a certain food or tool.
ReciPic will choose the illustration for eachfood and cooking tool by their name, and thencombine them with certain rules, which are shownin Figure 1.

Figure 1. Rules for generating infographics.

3

ResultInput: 鍋に水、本だし、料理酒、みりん、濃口醤油、上白糖を入れて、手羽元を入れて強火にかける.
(Put water, hondashi, cooking sake, sweet sake,dark soy sauce, caster sugar and the chicken wings
in the pot, and set the strong ﬁre.).
a. Text analysis: 鍋 (pot) 水 (water) 本だし(hondashi) 料理酒 (cooking sake) みりん (sweetsake) 濃口醤油 (dark soy sauce) 上白糖 (castersugar) 入れ (put) 手羽元 (chicken wings) 入れ (put)
強火 (strong ﬁre) かける (set)b. User modiﬁcation: 鍋/T/T0 水/F/T0Ac0
本だし/F/T0Ac0 料理酒/F/T0Ac0 みりん/F/T0Ac0
濃口醤油/F/T0Ac0 上白糖/F/T0Ac0 入れ/Ac/Ac0
手羽元/F/T0Ac1 入れ/Ac/Ac1 強火/T/T1 かける/Ac/Ac2
c. Infographic:

Figure 2. Infographic.