A study of object naming according to the manufacturing processes in a cooking activity

Abstract

Usually, an intermediate object that appears for a short time during a process of production, for instance "minced onion," does not have a common and specific name. In this paper, we study how people designate such an intermediate object using their own wording. First, we investigated the human naming structure employed for an intermediate object using a questionnaire survey of 20 female homemaker subjects. The result showed that the subjects most frequently designated an intermediate object by the name(s) of its component material(s), even when its appearance changed completely as compared to the original object(s). When the name(s) of the component(s) referred to more than two object candidates, the subjects tended to add the name of the last process performed to the target object, or the name of the final product that the target was going to be. Second, we proposed an algorithm for searching a target food designated by the user in his/her words. This algorithm successfully determined an average of 93% of the foods designated by the user at any time during the cooking process.