A Food Recommendation System Based on Semantic Annotations and Reference Prescriptions

Food recommendation, as well as searching for health-related information, presents particular characteristics unlike conventional recommender systems, since it often has educational purposes, to improve behavioural habits of users. In this paper, we present a menu generation system that uses a recipe dataset and annotations to recommend menus according to user’s preferences. Moreover, reference prescription schemes are defined to guide our system for suggesting suitable choices. Firstly, relevant recipes are selected by content-based retrieval, based on comparisons among features used to annotate both users’ profiles and recipes. Then, menus are generated using the selected recipes and are ranked taking into account also prescription schemes.