This repo contains scripts to extract the Quantity, Unit, Name, and Comments from unstructured ingredient phrases. We use it on Cooking to format incoming recipes. Given the following input:
1 pound carrots, young ones if possible
Kosher salt, to taste
2 tablespoons sherry vinegar
2 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium-size shallot, peeled and finely diced
1/2 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves, finely chopped
Black pepper, to taste
Our tool produces something like:
{
"qty": "1",
"unit": "pound"
"name": "carrots",
"other": ",",
"comment": "young ones if possible",
"input": "1 pound carrots, young ones if possible",
"display": "<span class='qty'>1</span><span class='unit'>pound</span><span class='name'>carrots</span><span class='other'>,</span><span class='comment'>young ones if possible</span>",
}
We use a conditional random field model (CRF) to extract tags from labelled training data, which was tagged by human news assistants. We wrote about our approach on the New York Times Open blog. More information about CRFs can be found here.
On a 2012 Macbook Pro, training the model takes roughly 30 minutes for 130k examples using the CRF++ library.
On OSX:
brew install crf++
python setup.py install
The most common usage is to train the model with a subset of our data, test the model against a different subset, then visualize the results. We provide a shell script to do this, at:
./roundtrip.sh
You can edit this script to specify the size of your training and testing set. The default is 20k training examples and 2k test examples.
To train the model, we must first convert our input data into a format which
crf_learn can accept:
bin/generate_data --data-path=input.csv --count=1000 --offset=0 > tmp/train_file
The count argument specifies the number of training examples (i.e. ingredient
lines) to read, and offset specifies which line to start with. There are
roughly 180k examples in our snapshot of the New York Times cooking database
(which we include in this repo), so it is useful to run against a subset.
The output of this step looks something like:
1 I1 L8 NoCAP NoPAREN B-QTY
cup I2 L8 NoCAP NoPAREN B-UNIT
white I3 L8 NoCAP NoPAREN B-NAME
wine I4 L8 NoCAP NoPAREN I-NAME
1/2 I1 L4 NoCAP NoPAREN B-QTY
cup I2 L4 NoCAP NoPAREN B-UNIT
sugar I3 L4 NoCAP NoPAREN B-NAME
2 I1 L8 NoCAP NoPAREN B-QTY
tablespoons I2 L8 NoCAP NoPAREN B-UNIT
dry I3 L8 NoCAP NoPAREN B-NAME
white I4 L8 NoCAP NoPAREN I-NAME
wine I5 L8 NoCAP NoPAREN I-NAME
Next, we pass this file to crf_learn, to generate a model file:
crf_learn template_file tmp/train_file tmp/model_file
To use the model to tag your own arbitrary ingredient lines (stored here in
input.txt), you must first convert it into the CRF++ format, then run against
the model file which we generated above. We provide another helper script to do
this:
python bin/parse-ingredients.py input.txt > results.txt
The output is also in CRF++ format, which isn't terribly helpful to us. To convert it into JSON:
python bin/convert-to-json.py results.txt > results.json
See the top of this README for an example of the expected output.