Chinese Cookbook

Project Plan and Milestones

Weekly Project Plan

Date	Data Collection	Data Processing	Data Analysis	Web Construction
Week 3	Search historical Chinese cookbooks and compare them
Week 4	Choose one historical Chinese cookbook Select the chapter to work on
Week 5	Get data from the website	First clean and sort the data Construct the dataset of recipes Find Ancient Chinese to Modern Chinese translation model
Week 6		Construct the dataset of ingredients Translating from Ancient Chinese to Modern Chinese
Week 7		Categorize data
Week 8			Analyse cooking method, effect, category, and ingredient frequency Visualization	Start web construction
Week 9			Analyse ingredient and ingredient category pairing Visualization	Continue web construction
Week 10			Analyse effect and ingredient pairing Visualization	Continue web construction Construct recipe filtering and recommendation system
Week 11		Modren Chinese to English translation		Continue web construction Construct recipe filtering and recommendation system Add data analysis and visualization to the website
Week 12		Modren Chinese to English translation		Continue web construction Add data analysis and visualization to the website
Week 13				Finalize and improve the website
Week 14				Prepare the Wikipedia page & final presentation

Milestone 1

• Prepare a project proposal and the goal and objective of the project
• Get Chinese cooking book data from the website

Milestone 2

• Clean the data and construct the datasets for the Chinese cooking book
• Translate from Ancient Chinese and Modern Chinese
• Categorize the data depending on ingredient, effect, category, and cooking method

Milestone 3

• Data Analysis
• Web construction and recipe filtering and recommendation system
• Prepare final presentation and Wikipedia page

Methods

Data Collection

Chinese Text project website pages for book "Yinshanzhengyao"

"Yinshanzhengyao" was published in 1330 during the Yuan dynasty, and all existing editions are derived from the Ming dynasty edition of 1456. Despite the presence of a scanned version of the book on the internet, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) poses a challenge due to the ancient Chinese text and the inclusion of illustrations. Fortunately, the Chinese Text Project (中國哲學書電子書計劃) has undertaken the noble initiative of providing open access to ancient Chinese books for both Chinese and non-Chinese scholars, resulting in the creation of a comprehensive database. Currently, it encompasses over thirty thousand books, making it the largest among historical Chinese literature databases.

"Yinshanzhengyao" is among the books included in this extensive database. Leveraging the well-defined structure of the database, we scrape data from the website. Given the project's specific focus on the recipes within the book, our data extraction is limited to the recipe content, which includes the following chapter:

• Strange Delicacies of Combined Flavours 1, 2, 3
• Various Hot Beverages and Concentrates
• Foods that Cure Various Illnesses

In total, there are 210 recipes, each accompanied by information on its effects, ingredients with quantities, and step-by-step instructions. As a medical text, the "effect" refers to the benefits of the food and precautions to be taken, providing valuable insights into the medicinal properties of the recipes.

Data Processing

Translation: Ancient Chinese to Modern Chinese

The text is written in ancient Chinese, but contemporary communication predominantly employs modern Chinese. Consequently, for in-depth data analysis, it is essential to translate the recipes from ancient Chinese to modern Chinese. In our evaluation, we compared the proficiency of an ancient Chinese to modern Chinese translation model (Figure 2) against ChatGPT 3.5 (Figure 3). Our findings indicate that the translations generated by ChatGPT are more fluent and closely aligned with contemporary language usage. Based on this observation, we have chosen to adopt ChatGPT as our primary translation tool.

Figure 2. Ancient Chinese to Modern Chinese model

Figure 3. ChatGpt