The syntactic and semantic analyses of 2,500 dish names retrieved from 112 restaurant, tavern, and patisserie menus in Eastern Macedonia and in Thrace in Northern Greece show that only a small number of concepts are denoted by the heads of these noun phrases (NPs): Main Ingredient (MI) of a dish, Way of preparation, Part or Cuts (for MIs with an animal as a source), and the word “portion.” Seventy percent of the dish names are headed by a noun denoting the MI or the Way of preparation in which case the MI is introduced by a modifier of the head. Syntactically, these are mostly normal Modern Greek NPs, although NPs consisting of adjacent nouns offer fertile grounds for discussing aspects of compound formation in this language. This study has instructed the structuring of a knowledge base aimed to support applications in gastronomic tourism (menu translation, provision of gastronomic, dietary, and cultural information about the foods).

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We present AΜAΛΘΕΙA (AMALTHIA), an application ontology that models the domain of dishes as they are presented in 112 menus collected from restaurants/taverns/patisseries in East Macedonia and Thrace in Northern Greece. AΜAΛΘΕΙA supports a tourist mobile application offering multilingual translation of menus, dietary and cultural information about the dishes and their ingredients, as well as information about the geographical dispersion of the dishes. In this document, we focus on the food/dish dimension that constitutes the ontology’s backbone. Its dish-oriented perspective differentiates AΜAΛΘΕΙA from other food ontologies and thesauri, such as Langual, enabling it to codify information about the dishes served, particularly considering the fact that they are subject to wide variation due to the inevitable evolution of recipes over time, to geographical and cultural dispersion, and to the chef’s creativity. We argue for the adopted design decisions by drawing on semantic information retrieved from the menus, as well as other social and commercial facts, and compare AMAΛΘΕΙA with other important taxonomies in the food field. To the best of our knowledge, AΜAΛΘΕΙA is the first ontology modeling (i) dish variation and (ii) Greek (commercial) cuisine (a component of the Mediterranean diet).

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