This paper presents a case study on how to process cooking recipes (and more generally, how-to instructions) in a way that makes it possible for a robot or artificial cooking assistant to support human chefs in the kitchen. Such AI assistants would be of great benefit to society, as they can help to sustain the autonomy of aging adults or people with a physical impairment, or they may reduce the stress in a professional kitchen. We propose a novel approach to computational recipe understanding that mimics the human sense-making process, which is narrative-based. Using an English recipe for almond crescent cookies as illustration, we show how recipes can be modelled as rich narrative structures by integrating various knowledge sources such as language processing, ontologies, and mental simulation. We show how such narrative structures can be used for (a) dealing with the challenges of recipe language, such as zero anaphora, (b) optimizing a robot's planning process, (c) measuring how well an AI system understands its current tasks, and (d) allowing recipe annotations to become language-independent.

翻译：本文提出一项案例研究，探讨如何以机器人或人工智能烹饪助手能够在厨房中辅助人类厨师的方式处理烹饪食谱（以及更广泛的操作指南）。此类人工智能助手将对社会产生巨大裨益，因为它们有助于维持老年人或身体障碍人士的自主生活能力，或可减轻专业厨房的工作压力。我们提出一种新颖的计算菜谱理解方法，该方法模仿了人类基于叙事的理解过程。以一份杏仁新月曲奇的英文食谱为例，我们展示了如何通过整合语言处理、本体论和心理模拟等多种知识源，将食谱建模为丰富的叙事结构。我们进一步阐述了此类叙事结构如何用于：（a）应对菜谱语言中的挑战（如零指代），（b）优化机器人的规划过程，（c）衡量人工智能系统对其当前任务的理解程度，以及（d）实现菜谱标注的语言无关性。