Intents vs Slots? Putting the "U" in NLU

I know this question has been asked quite a few times but I haven’t seen something that’s exactly for my use case so I’m hoping we could look at this from a new perspective (thanks in advance for the repetitive answers!). So I have a situation that I’m using entity roles for, for example’s sake let’s say I’m trying to ask " what’s your favorite food and how often do you eat it? "

currently my intent looks like this:

  • inform_favorite_food:

    • i love [pizza]{entity: favorite_food, role: food} and I eat it [every day]{entity: favorite_food, role: time}
    • my favorite food is [fruit]{entity: favorite_food, role: food} which I have [monday-friday]{entity: favorite_food, role: time}
    • I eat [popcorn] {entity: favorite_food, role: food} [5 days a week]{entity: favorite_food, role: time}

It’s doing a good job collecting the entities/roles. Now I’d like my bot to have a bit more “understanding” rather than just classification. To be specific, I want it to be able to know that monday-friday is the same thing as 5 days a week which is the same thing as every work day which is the same thing as every day except weekends, etc…

Do I need to split this up into different intents? Ex:

  • inform_favorite_food_5days:

    • i love [pizza]{entity: favorite_food, role: food} and I eat it every day except weekends
    • my favorite food is [fruit]{entity: favorite_food, role: food} which I have monday-friday
    • I eat [popcorn] {entity: favorite_food, role: food} 5 days a week
  • inform_favorite_food_2days:

    • i love [pizza]{entity: favorite_food, role: food} and I eat it only on weekends
    • my favorite food is [fruit]{entity: favorite_food, role: food} which I have saturday and sunday
    • I eat [popcorn] {entity: favorite_food, role: food} 2 days a week

Or is there a way to group slots together in another manner? My other thought is to train a separate model which I add as a pickle file and then use it for inference within the form itself. Thanks in advance!!