Food Ingredients Similarity Based on Conceptual and Textual Similarity

Open Food Facts provides a database of food products such as product names, compositions, and additives, where everyone can contribute to add the data or reuse the existing data. The open food facts data are dirty and needs to be processed before storing the data to our system. To reduce redundancy in food ingredients data, we measure the similarity of ingredient food using two similarities: the conceptual similarity and textual similarity. The conceptual similarity measures the similarity between the two datasets by its word meaning (synonym), while the textual similarity is based on fuzzy string matching, namely Levenshtein distance, Jaro-Winkler distance, and Jaccard distance. Based on our evaluation, the combination of similarity measurements using textual and Wordnet similarity (conceptual) was the most optimal similarity method in food ingredients.