In this paper, we provide a dataset that gives visual grounding annotations to recipe flow graphs. A recipe flow graph is a representation of the cooking workflow, which is designed with the aim of understanding the workflow from natural language processing. Such a workflow will increase its value when grounded to real-world activities, and visual grounding is a way to do so. Visual grounding is provided as bounding boxes to image sequences of recipes, and each bounding box is linked to an element of the workflow. Because the workflows are also linked to the text, this annotation gives visual grounding with workflow’s contextual information between procedural text and visual observation in an indirect manner. We subsidiarily annotated two types of event attributes with each bounding box: “doing-the-action,” or “done-the-action”. As a result of the annotation, we got 2,300 bounding boxes in 272 flow graph recipes. Various experiments showed that the proposed dataset enables us to estimate contextual information described in recipe flow graphs from an image sequence.

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.

In this paper, we present our attempt at annotating procedural texts with a flow graph as a representation of understanding. The domain we focus on is cooking recipe. The flow graphs are directed acyclic graphs with a special root node corresponding to the final dish. The vertex labels are recipe named entities, such as foods, tools, cooking actions, etc. The arc labels denote relationships among them. We converted 266 Japanese recipe texts into flow graphs manually. 200 recipes are randomly selected from a web site and 66 are of the same dish. We detail the annotation framework and report some statistics on our corpus. The most typical usage of our corpus may be automatic conversion from texts to flow graphs which can be seen as an entire understanding of procedural texts. With our corpus, one can also try word segmentation, named entity recognition, predicate-argument structure analysis, and coreference resolution.