Your new experience awaits. Try the new design now and help us make it even better

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Artif. Intell.

Sec. Natural Language Processing

RiCoRecA: Rich Cooking Recipe Annotation Schema

Provisionally accepted
  • 1Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, United Kingdom
  • 2The University of Manchester, Manchester, England, United Kingdom

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Despite recent advancements, modern kitchens, at best, have one or more isolated (noncommunicating) "smart" devices. The vision of having a fully-fledged ambient kitchen where devices know what to do and when has yet to be realised. To address this, we present RiCoRecA, a novel schema for parsing cooking recipes into a workflow representation suitable for automation, a step towards that direction. Methodologically, the schema requires a number of information extraction tasks, i.e., annotating named entities, identifying relations between them, coreference resolution, and entity tracking. RiCoRecA differs from previously reported approaches in that it learns these different information extraction tasks using one joint model. We also provide a dataset containing annotations that follow this schema. Furthermore, we compared two transformer-based models for parsing recipes into workflows, namely, PEGASUS-X and LongT5. Our results demonstrate that PEGASUS-X surpassed LongT5 on all of the annotation tasks. Specifically, PEGASUS-X surpassed LongT5 by 39% in terms of F-Score when averaging the performance on all the tasks; it demonstrated almost human-like performance.

Keywords: Information Extraction, Workflow Extraction, Generative Encoder-Decoder Models, Instructional text, Language resources, Internet of Things

Received: 23 Dec 2024; Accepted: 04 Dec 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Ventirozos, Jacobo-Romero, Alrdahi, Clinch and Batista-Navarro. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Filippos Karolos Ventirozos

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.