Regularity and Variation in Japanese Recipes: A Comparative Analysis of Cookbook, Online, and User-generated Sub-registers

This paper investigates the similarities and differences between three sub-registers of Japanese recipe texts: cookbook recipes, online commercial recipes written/edited by professionals, and online usergenerated recipes. Past studies on Japanese recipes do not distinguish different sub-registers, and they tend to focus on a single feature. The present study of the sub-registers examines a group of frequently appearing linguistic features and uncovers functional links between observed features and situational characteristics. The comparative perspective contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the Japanese recipe language as well as universal and language-specific aspects of register variation. Shared traits among the three sub-registers are tied to the common topic of cooking and the central purpose of providing easy-to-follow food preparation instructions. Varied linguistic and textual features are motivated by different production circumstances, mediums, and relations among the participants. Professionally edited cookbook and online commercial recipes show a much higher uniformity in their grammatical features than unedited/self-edited user-generated recipes. Online sub-registers share a role of serving as a repository and reference center for numerous recipes and related information. Relationships among writers, readers, and other participants such as publishers and site organizers differ among all three sub-registers, resulting in some unique linguistic patterns

Developing Sous Vide/Freezing Systems for Ready-Meal omponents

End of project reportSous vide cooking involves sealing raw or par-cooked food in a vacuumised laminated plastic pouch or container, cooking by controlled heating, rapid chilling and then re-heating for consumption. The chilled storage period is up to 21 days at 0 to 3oC. The recommended thermal process for sous vide products is 90oC for 10min or its time-temperature equivalent. Concerns about the safety of sous vide products, mainly due to the potential for temperature abuse in the chill chain, has prevented the widespread use of this technology. The role of the current project, therefore, was to investigate sous vide cooking followed by freezing, as a safe alternative to sous vide/chilling for 10 ready-meal components i.e. carbohydrates (potatoes, pasta, rice), vegetables (carrots, broccoli) and muscle foods (salmon, cod, chicken, beef and lamb).National Development Plan (NDP

Dimensions of Recipe Register and Native Speaker Knowledge: Observations from a Writing Experiment

This study investigates native Japanese speakers’ context-dependent linguistic knowledge of cooking recipes. Recipes are a typical example of a register, defined as the use of language in a particular social situation for a specific purpose. Thirty participants in the present study were asked to write a recipe for curry rice (a popular dish in Japan) or an unnamed soup (shown in a photo) on a blank piece of paper without access to any resources. Most participants’ texts contained specialized vocabulary and basic procedural organization. On the other hand, few integrated the typical grammatical features of commercial recipes. It suggests that the latter details are not part of the communicative repertoires of most participants. The grammatical characteristics of commercial recipes are likely a product of careful editing, aimed for clarity and consistency. Professional editing appears to have a significant role in shaping the grammar of the written register

A comparison of cooking recipe named entities between Japanese and English

In this paper, we analyze the structural differences between the instructional text in Japanese and English cooking recipes. First, we constructed an English recipe corpus of 100 recipes, designed to be comparable to an existing Japanese recipe corpus. We annotated recipe named entities (r-NEs) in the English corpus according to guidelines previously defined for Japanese. We trained a state-of-art NE recognizer, PWNER, on the English r-NEs, and achieved very similar accuracy and coverage to previous results for the Japanese corpus, thus demonstrating the quality and consistency of the annotations. Second, we compared the r-NEs annotated in the Japanese and English corpora, and uncovered lexical, semantic, and underlying structural differences between Japanese and English recipes. We discuss reasons for these differences, which have significant implications for cross-language retrieval and automatic translation of recipes

A comparison of cooking recipe named entities between Japanese and English

In this paper, we analyze the structural differences between the instructional text in Japanese and English cooking recipes. First, we constructed an English recipe corpus of 100 recipes, designed to be comparable to an existing Japanese recipe corpus. We annotated recipe named entities (r-NEs) in the English corpus according to guidelines previously defined for Japanese. We trained a state-of-art NE recognizer, PWNER, on the English r-NEs, and achieved very similar accuracy and coverage to previous results for the Japanese corpus, thus demonstrating the quality and consistency of the annotations. Second, we compared the r-NEs annotated in the Japanese and English corpora, and uncovered lexical, semantic, and underlying structural differences between Japanese and English recipes. We discuss reasons for these differences, which have significant implications for cross-language retrieval and automatic translation of recipes

English recipe flow graph corpus

We present an annotated corpus of English cooking recipe procedures, and describe and evaluate computational methods for learning these annotations. The corpus consists of 300 recipes written by members of the public, which we have annotated with domain-specific linguistic and semantic structure. Each recipe is annotated with (1) `recipe named entities' (r-NEs) specific to the recipe domain, and (2) a flow graph representing in detail the sequencing of steps, and interactions between cooking tools, food ingredients and the products of intermediate steps. For these two kinds of annotations, inter-annotator agreement ranges from 82.3 to 90.5 F1, indicating that our annotation scheme is appropriate and consistent. We experiment with producing these annotations automatically. For r-NE tagging we train a deep neural network NER tool; to compute flow graphs we train a dependency-style parsing procedure which we apply to the entire sequence of r-NEs in a recipe.In evaluations, our systems achieve 71.1 to 87.5 F1, demonstrating that our annotation scheme is learnable

Characterisation of physicochemical properties of different oat cultivars used in noodle processing: effects on quality and β-glucan

Research characterised the physicochemical properties of different oat cultivars used in noodle processing and their effects on noodle quality and β-glucan content. The effect of oat cultivar, season and processing on noodle and β-glucan quality was investigated. This research provided an insight into the quality differences between oat cultivars, effect of season on oat cultivar quality and the oat cultivars most suitable for incorporation into oat-wheat noodles in terms of processing, sensory and nutritional properties