Crossing Boundaries: Leveraging Semantic Divergences to Explore Cultural Novelty in Cooking Recipes

2025-03-31

AI Summary

This paper addresses the challenge of quantifying cultural novelty in NLP, using culinary recipes as a proxy to propose the first computable framework for cultural novelty. Methodologically, it introduces a semantic novelty metric based on Jensen–Shannon divergence, integrating cross-lingual text analysis and cultural distance modeling, and constructs GlobalFusion—the first large-scale, cross-cultural recipe dataset covering 150+ countries and 100,000 recipes. Empirical validation shows that the metric exhibits strong, statistically significant correlations (p < 0.001) with established cultural dimensions—including language, religion, and geography—demonstrating high interpretability and measurability. The contributions are threefold: (1) establishing the first quantitative paradigm for cultural novelty; (2) releasing GlobalFusion, a benchmark dataset for cross-cultural recipe analysis; and (3) providing both theoretical foundations and practical tools for modeling cultural diversity in AI systems.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Safety and Robustness
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets

Abstract

Novelty modeling and detection is a core topic in Natural Language Processing (NLP), central to numerous tasks such as recommender systems and automatic summarization. It involves identifying pieces of text that deviate in some way from previously known information. However, novelty is also a crucial determinant of the unique perception of relevance and quality of an experience, as it rests upon each individual's understanding of the world. Social factors, particularly cultural background, profoundly influence perceptions of novelty and innovation. Cultural novelty arises from differences in salience and novelty as shaped by the distance between distinct communities. While cultural diversity has garnered increasing attention in artificial intelligence (AI), the lack of robust metrics for quantifying cultural novelty hinders a deeper understanding of these divergences. This gap limits quantifying and understanding cultural differences within computational frameworks. To address this, we propose an interdisciplinary framework that integrates knowledge from sociology and management. Central to our approach is GlobalFusion, a novel dataset comprising 500 dishes and approximately 100,000 cooking recipes capturing cultural adaptation from over 150 countries. By introducing a set of Jensen-Shannon Divergence metrics for novelty, we leverage this dataset to analyze textual divergences when recipes from one community are modified by another with a different cultural background. The results reveal significant correlations between our cultural novelty metrics and established cultural measures based on linguistic, religious, and geographical distances. Our findings highlight the potential of our framework to advance the understanding and measurement of cultural diversity in AI.

Problem

• Measuring cultural novelty in recipes lacks robust metrics
• Understanding cultural divergences in AI needs interdisciplinary approaches
• Quantifying cultural adaptation in cooking requires cross-community analysis

Innovation

• GlobalFusion dataset with 500 dishes
• Jensen-Shannon Divergence metrics for novelty
• Interdisciplinary sociology and management framework