Food recommendation system has proven as an effective technology to provide guidance on dietary choices, and this is especially important for patients suffering from chronic diseases. Unlike other multimedia recommendations, such as books and movies, food recommendation task is highly relied on the context at the moment, since users' food preference can be highly dynamic over time. For example, individuals tend to eat more calories earlier in the day and eat a little less at dinner. However, there are still limited research works trying to incorporate both current context and nutritional knowledge for food recommendation. Thus, a novel restaurant food recommendation system is proposed in this paper to recommend food dishes to users according to their special nutritional needs. Our proposed system utilises Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology and a transformer-based deep learning model, Learning to Rank (LTR) model, to conduct food recommendation. Given a single RGB image of the menu, the system is then able to rank the food dishes in terms of the input search key (e.g., calorie, protein level). Due to the property of the transformer, our system can also rank unseen food dishes. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to validate our methods on a self-constructed menu dataset, known as MenuRank dataset. The promising results, with accuracy ranging from 77.2% to 99.5%, have demonstrated the great potential of LTR model in addressing food recommendation problems.

Systems that find music recordings based on hummed or sung, melodic input are called Query-By-Humming (QBH) systems. Such systems employ search keys that are more similar to a cappella singing than the original recordings. Successful deployed systems use human computation to create these search keys: hand-entered MIDI melodies or recordings of a cappella singing. Tunebot is one such system. In this paper, we compare search results using keys built from two automated melody extraction system to those gathered using two populations of humans: local paid singers and Amazon Turk workers.