Towards Diet Management with Automatic Reasoning and Persuasive Natural Language Generation

Abstract

Abstract. We devise a scenario where the interaction between man and food is mediated by an intelligent system that, on the basis of various factors, encourages or discourages the user to eat a specific dish. The main factors that the system need to account for are (1) the diet that the user intends to follow, (2) the food that s/he has eaten in the last days, and (3) the nutritional values of the dishes and their specific recipes. Automatic reasoning and Natural Language Generation (NLG) play a fundamental role in this project: the compatibility of a food with a diet is formalized as a Simple Temporal Problem (STP), while the NLG tries to motivate the user. In this paper we describe these two facilities and their interface.

Building a Persuasive Virtual Dietitian

“…The MADiMan system is a virtual dietitian designed to fulfil three basic tasks: (1) retrieve the nutritional information of a dish directly from its recipe, (2) exploiting such nutrition information and data regarding diets by allowing some forms of diet disobedience while pursuing the goals of the diets and (3) encourage the user to reduce these disobedience acts. MADiMan offers facilities for verifying the compatibility and predicting the effect of disobedience acts on a specific diet [10,11]. Figure 1 shows the architecture of the MADiMan system.…”

“…This paper addresses persuasive natural language message generation (NLG) in the domain of dietary regimens. We describe the implementation of the NLG module of the diet management system called MADiMan (Multimedia Application for Diet Management) [10]. The goal of MADiMan is to build a complete computer infrastructure for helping people to follow a healthy diet.…”

“…In previous work, we discussed the general architecture of the MADiMan system [10,11] and the capacity of the reasoning module with a number of simulation experiments with virtual agents based on hospital menus [12] and on Mediterranean menus [13,14]. The research questions that we explore in this paper concern the NLG module of MADiMan, which has been partially previously described in some preliminary work [15,16].…”

Adopting the Mediterranean Diet Score in a Diet Management System

“…However, for psychological and cognitive reasons, it can be very difficult for a user to understand the numeric constraints regarding micro and macro nutrients. For this specific task, computers can help people both in (1) computing the values of the macronutrients in the meal actually eaten, and (2) reminding the best choices for next meals (Anselma and Mazzei, 2015). However, it remains open the problem of explanation, that is, in order to guide an user to improve its dietetic behaviour, the computer needs to explain in details of the diet transgression .…”

Designing and testing the messages produced by a virtual dietitian

“…In this paper we consider the generation of persuasive natural language messages in the diet domain. We describe the actual implementation of the natural language generation (NLG) module of the diet management system called MADiMan (Multimedia Application for Diet Management) (Anselma and Mazzei, 2015). One of the main goals of this project is to investigate on the possibility to apply persuasive NLG for helping people to have a virtuous behavior (Reiter et al, 2003;Kaptein et al, 2012;Braun et al, 2015Braun et al, , 2018Conde-Clemente et al, 2018).…”