Abstract: Existing approaches to recipe generation are unable to create recipes for users with culinary preferences but incomplete knowledge of ingredients in specific dishes. We propose a new task of personalized recipe generation to help these users: expanding a name and incomplete ingredient details into complete natural-text instructions aligned with the user's historical preferences. We attend on technique- and recipe-level representations of a user's previously consumed recipes, fusing these 'user-aware' representations in an attention fusion layer to control recipe text generation. Experiments on a new dataset of 180K recipes and 700K interactions show our model's ability to generate plausible and personalized recipes compared to non-personalized baselines.

Introduction: In the kitchen, we increasingly rely on instructions from cooking websites: recipes. A cook with a predilection for Asian cuisine may wish to prepare chicken curry, but may not know all necessary ingredients apart from a few basics. These users with limited knowledge cannot rely on existing recipe generation approaches that focus on creating coherent recipes given all ingredients and a recipe name BIBREF0. Such models do not address issues of personal preference (e.g. culinary tastes, garnish choices) and incomplete recipe details. We propose to approach both problems via personalized generation of plausible, user-specific recipes using user preferences extracted from previously consumed recipes. Our work combines two important tasks from natural language processing and recommender systems: data-to-text generation BIBREF1 and personalized recommendation BIBREF2. Our model takes as user input the name of a specific dish, a few key ingredients, and a calorie level. We pass these loose input specifications to an encoder-decoder framework and attend on user profiles—learned latent representations of recipes previously consumed by a user—to generate a recipe personalized to the user's tastes. We fuse these `user-aware' representations with decoder output in an attention fusion layer to jointly determine text generation. Quantitative (perplexity, user-ranking) and qualitative analysis on user-aware model outputs confirm that personalization indeed assists in generating plausible recipes from incomplete ingredients. While personalized text generation has seen success in conveying user writing styles in the product review BIBREF3, BIBREF4 and dialogue BIBREF5 spaces, we are the first to consider it for the problem of recipe generation, where output quality is heavily dependent on the content of the instructions—such as ingredients and cooking techniques. To summarize, our main contributions are as follows: We explore a new task of generating plausible and personalized recipes from incomplete input specifications by leveraging historical user preferences; We release a new dataset of 180K+ recipes and 700K+ user reviews for this task; We introduce new evaluation strategies for generation quality in instructional texts, centering on quantitative measures of coherence. We also show qualitatively and quantitatively that personalized models generate high-quality and specific recipes that align with historical user preferences.

Question: What metrics are used for evaluation?
Answer: Byte-Pair Encoding perplexity  (BPE PPL),
BLEU-1,
BLEU-4,
ROUGE-L,
percentage of distinct unigram (D-1),
percentage of distinct bigrams(D-2),
user matching accuracy(UMA),
Mean Reciprocal Rank(MRR)
Pairwise preference over baseline(PP)