This data set was prepared from 88 open-source YouTube cooking videos. The YouCook dataset contains videos of people cooking various recipes. The videos were downloaded from YouTube and are all in the third-person viewpoint; they represent a significantly more challenging visual problem than existing cooking and kitchen datasets (the background kitchen/scene is different for many and most videos have dynamic camera changes). In addition, frame-by-frame object and action annotations are provided for training data (as well as a number of precomputed low-level features). Finally, each video has a number of human provided natural language descriptions (on average, there are eight different descriptions per video). This dataset has been created to serve as a benchmark in describing complex real-world videos with natural language descriptions.