How can we retrieve the actual question identified by the ResponseSelector

Rasa Open Source
1

Hi everybody :slightly_smiling_face:

I just started experimenting with the Response Selector which looks quite promising.

How could I retrieve the actual question that was asked? For example, if we defined the following FAQ questions ask_faq/python_version and ask_faq/languages, how could I retrieve python_version and language?

The reason I’d like to have this is to override the respond_ask_faq action and so that we can use our own NLG server to respond to the FAQs. This would allow us to use slots, more than a single response, and a way of changing the responses in the database instead of having to retrain them in the model.

I know we could achieve the same with intents hierarchies with the intent split symbol but I very much like the idea of having a single intent/response in our stories. This makes handling unhappy path so much easier.

Thanks for your insights! Cheers Nicolas

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Hi @tyd! Hope you are doing great!

This is the issue I mentioned to you yesterday for our custom FAQs that we’d love to migrate to something similar to the ResponseSelector.

Our main use case for this is the following. We have many FAQ-type questions for specific apartments. Such questions could be:

  • Where is the apartment located? ask_location
  • How is the neighborhood? ask_location_information
  • Is there a parking lot? (ask_features -> similar to a knowledge base question)
  • Are dogs allowed? (ask_pet)
  • Can I see some pictures? (ask_pictures)
  • etc.

We have about 10 such questions which are currently separate intents, each of which with a different action as a response (custom or not). The problem is that the response to each of these questions depends on which apartment we are talking about. Our custom actions and our NLG server combined with slots work perfectly for it.

What would be awesome is to have a single intent and a action dealing with all of these questions. For this, we would need access to which “subintent” was identified instead of the actual response. It would be really easy to hack it if we got ask_faq/python_version anywhere in the metadata of the selected response.

Cheers! Nicolas

Also tagging Cristian (@cristianmtr) who works with me on our chatbot.

1 Like
3

Hey @nbeuchat and @cristianmtr! Sorry for the delay. We talked about this internally and decided that this is relevant / good thing to expose in the metadata. There is actually already another issue for a different use case but that has the same root cause: Retrieval intent needs to store full intent name in tracker · Issue #4826 · RasaHQ/rasa · GitHub.

Can you create an issue for this on the Rasa Open Source GitHub repo, so we can get it prioritised for development?