A commonsense reasoning framework for substitution in cooking

The ability to substitute some resource or tool for another is a common and important human ability. For example, in cooking, we often lack an ingredient for a recipe and we solve this problem by finding a substitute ingredient. There are various ways that we may reason about this. Often we need to draw on commonsense reasoning to find a substitute. For instance, we can think of the properties of the missing item, and try to find similar items with similar properties. Despite the importance of substitution in human intelligence, there is a lack of a theoretical understanding of the faculty. To address this shortcoming, we propose a commonsense reasoning framework for conceptualizing and harnessing substitution. In order to ground our proposal, we focus on cooking. Though we believe the proposal can be straightforwardly adapted to other applications that require formalization of substitution. Our approach is to produce a general framework based on distance measures for determining similarity (e.g. between ingredients, or between processing steps), and on identifying inconsistencies between the logical representation of recipes and integrity constraints that we use to flag the need for mitigation (e.g. after substituting one kind of pasta for another in a recipe, we may identify an inconsistency in the cooking time, and this is resolved by updating the cooking time).