SHARE: a System for Hierarchical Assistive Recipe Editing

TL;DR

SHARE is a hierarchical system that enables controllable editing of recipes to meet specific dietary restrictions, improving recipe adaptation and usability for home cooks.

Contribution

We introduce SHARE, a novel hierarchical system that performs ingredient substitution and step generation for dietary-constrained recipe editing, surpassing existing methods.

Findings

SHARE produces coherent recipes aligned with dietary constraints.

Human evaluations show recipes are easy to follow and appealing.

Real-world trials confirm practical usability for home cooks.

Abstract

The large population of home cooks with dietary restrictions is under-served by existing cooking resources and recipe generation models. To help them, we propose the task of controllable recipe editing: adapt a base recipe to satisfy a user-specified dietary constraint. This task is challenging, and cannot be adequately solved with human-written ingredient substitution rules or existing end-to-end recipe generation models. We tackle this problem with SHARE: a System for Hierarchical Assistive Recipe Editing, which performs simultaneous ingredient substitution before generating natural-language steps using the edited ingredients. By decoupling ingredient and step editing, our step generator can explicitly integrate the available ingredients. Experiments on the novel RecipePairs dataset -- 83K pairs of similar recipes where each recipe satisfies one of seven dietary constraints -- demonstrate that SHARE produces convincing, coherent recipes that are appropriate for a target dietary constraint. We further show through human evaluations and real-world cooking trials that recipes edited by SHARE can be easily followed by home cooks to create appealing dishes.