Food as Text

Abstract

This paper aims to describe the initial steps in building a diachronic and interdisciplinary corpus that would present different aspects of the language of food in the Serbian language. This corpus consists of culinary recipes, ethnographic and anthropological studies and other different testimonies about food in Serbia dating from the second half of the 19th century onward. Such corpus offers insights into eating habits in Serbia and how they changed under different cultural influences. The problems of automatic processing of this corpus are discusses, some experiments that rely on the use of existing lexical resources are presented, and directions for future work are given.