Formbot fails to recognise intents, even training data

Hello! We’re developing a complex scenario using complex forms and thought of seeking some help in the “formbot” example, it seems particularly fitting. But despite having run each step (including actions and the duckling server via docker, everything seems operational), the bot’s intent recognition seems to fail miserably, even fails to capture the intents that are defined as the very training data!

I’m using Rasa 3.1.0 installed from rasa[spacy] via pip (Ubuntu, Python 3.9.5, everything inside a virtualenv).

Bot loaded. Type a message and press enter (use '/stop' to exit): 
Your input ->  hello                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          
Sorry, I didn't understand you, please try input something else
Your input ->  hi                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             
Hello! I am restaurant search assistant! How can I help?
Your input ->  i need a restaurant                                                                                                                                                            
Hello! I am restaurant search assistant! How can I help?
Your input ->  looking for a restaurant                                                                                                                                                       
Sorry, I didn't understand you, please try input something else
Your input ->  im looking for a restaurant                                                                                                                                                    
You are welcome :)
Your input ->  im looking for a restaurant                                                                                                                                                    
You are welcome :)

A look at the interactive mode to see that looking for a restaurant is captured as the thankyou intent:

Type a message and press enter (press 'Ctrl-c' to exit).
? Your input -> im looking for a restaurant                                                                                                                                                   
? Your NLU model classified 'im looking for a restaurant' with intent 'thankyou' and there are no entities, is this correct? (Y/n)

I’d be grateful if you could help find the cause if this odd behaviour… perhaps some misconfiguration or this is an experimental version…

Hi @adam-ra. Could you please post some part of your code, including config file? It seems odd indeed.

Hello! I used the code and the config straight from this example from RASA repository:

I haven’t changed a single line. The repository is at commit e0e1e. I would be grateful for any hints, this odd behaviour could also be related to the trouble with training our own form-based chatbot.