[jsankey]

This is really interesting to me as I've just been solving the same ingredient parsing problem in my iOS app (Zest Recipe Manager) to implement smart shopping lists. Although I was tempted to use a statistical approach I opted to start with a more direct heuristic approach to see how far I could get (and to make sure I really understood the issues before trying a more generic solution).

The heuristic approach actually works pretty well, though with a significant amount of effort! A lot of ambiguities can be resolved with a custom algorithm of this kind. For shopping list support (where really the common cases matter most) the results are excellent. But there are ambiguities I have had to hack solutions to that would probably be better resolved via a probabilistic method. And there are cases where some actual NLP is required to properly detect extraneous descriptive phrases etc. I'm considering adding a statistical helper to my custom parser to take it to the next level.