Cultural Adaptation of Recipes
Yong Cao Yova Kementchedjhieva Ruixiang Cui Antonia Karamolegkou Li Zhou Megan Dare Lucia Donatelli Daniel Hershcovich
Building upon the considerable advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), we
are now equipped to address more sophisticated tasks demanding a nuanced
understanding of cross-cultural contexts. A key example is recipe adaptation,
which goes beyond simple translation to include a grasp of ingredients,
culinary techniques, and dietary preferences specific to a given culture. We
introduce a new task involving the translation and cultural adaptation of
recipes between Chinese and English-speaking cuisines. To support this
investigation, we present CulturalRecipes, a unique dataset comprised of
automatically paired recipes written in Mandarin Chinese and English. This
dataset is further enriched with a human-written and curated test set. In this
intricate task of cross-cultural recipe adaptation, we evaluate the performance
of various methods, including GPT-4 and other LLMs, traditional machine
translation, and information retrieval techniques. Our comprehensive analysis
includes both automatic and human evaluation metrics. While GPT-4 exhibits
impressive abilities in adapting Chinese recipes into English, it still lags
behind human expertise when translating English recipes into Chinese. This
underscores the multifaceted nature of cultural adaptations. We anticipate that
these insights will significantly contribute to future research on
culturally-aware language models and their practical application in culturally
diverse contexts.