Data collection and language understanding of food descriptions

This paper presents initial data collection and language understanding experiments conducted as part of a larger effort to create a nutrition dialogue system that automatically extracts food concepts from a user's spoken meal description. We first summarize the data collection and annotation of food descriptions performed via Amazon Mechanical Turk. We then present semantic labeling experiments using a semi-Markov conditional random field (CRF) that obtains an F1 test score of 85.1. Finally, we report food segmentation experiments that explored three methods for associating foods with their corresponding attributes: a generative Markov model, transformation-based learning, and a CRF classifier. The CRF performed best, achieving an F1 test score of 87.1.