KERL: Knowledge-Enhanced Personalized Recipe Recommendation using Large Language Models

Fnu Mohbat, Mohammed J Zaki


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.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.938
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
19125–19141
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.938/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fnu Mohbat and Mohammed J Zaki. 2025. KERL: Knowledge-Enhanced Personalized Recipe Recommendation using Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 19125–19141, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
KERL: Knowledge-Enhanced Personalized Recipe Recommendation using Large Language Models (Mohbat & Zaki, ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.938.pdf