Bridging Cultures in the Kitchen: A Framework and Benchmark for Cross-Cultural Recipe Retrieval

The cross-cultural adaptation of recipes is an important application of identifying and bridging cultural differences in language. The challenge lies in retaining the essence of the original recipe while also aligning with the writing and dietary habits of the target culture. Information Retrieval (IR) offers a way to address the challenge because it retrieves results from the culinary practices of the target culture while maintaining relevance to the original recipe. We introduce a novel task about cross-cultural recipe retrieval and present a unique Chinese-English cross-cultural recipe retrieval benchmark. Our benchmark is manually annotated under limited resource, utilizing various retrieval models to generate a pool of candidate results for manual annotation. The dataset provides retrieval samples that are culturally adapted but textually diverse, presenting greater challenges. We propose CARROT, a plug-and-play culturalaware recipe information retrieval framework that incorporates cultural-aware query rewriting and reranking methods and evaluate it both on our benchmark and intuitive human judgments. The results show that our framework significantly enhances the preservation of the original recipe and its cultural appropriateness for the target culture. We believe these insights will significantly contribute to future research on cultural adaptation. 红豆汤 Red Bean Soup English Recipe (GPT4 Generate) Ingredients: 1. 1 cup red beans 2. 4 cups water 3. 1/4 cup rice wine 4. 1 piece fresh ginger (about 2 inches), unpeeled and sliced English Recipe (Recipe Retrieval) 1. 2 Tablespoons Olive Oil 2. 1 Medium Onion 3. 800 grams Drained Cooked Red Beans. 4. 1 liter Vegetable Stock. Chinese Recipe Ingredients: 1. 适量红豆 Moderate amount of red bean 2. 适量米酒 Moderate amount of rice wine 3. 适量带皮老姜 Moderate amount of ginger with skin