Term-definition disambiguator

Problem

Recipe datasets contain conflicting terminology. “Corn flour” means cornstarch in the UK but masa harina in the US. “Tbsp” varies by region. Ingredient lists from different APIs use incompatible taxonomies, breaking search, substitution, and nutritional analysis pipelines.

Approach

Meridian maintains a canonical ingredient ontology with region-aware aliases. The disambiguator accepts a raw ingredient string plus optional locale hint, then returns the normalized canonical term, USDA NDB mapping, and confidence score.

Schema

Example

POST /v1/recipes/disambiguate
{
  "raw": "corn flour",
  "locale": "GB"
}

→ {
  "canonical": "cornstarch",
  "usda_ndb": "20027",
  "confidence": 0.97
}