Reliably recognising an email address and setting slot

Rasa Open Source
1

Hi

I have a simple form that currently only fills a single slot (more to be added) called email_address. I have an entity email_address and an intent my_email_address.

I’ve added intent examples to the nlu for my_email_address but Rasa doesn’t reliably recognise the email_address entity in the response if it doesn’t match one of the specific email address examples I have written in.

These are my intent examples in nlu.yml:

- intent: my_email_address
  examples: |
    - my email address is [example@example.com]{"entity":"email_address","value":"example@example.com"}
    - my email is [cheese@biscuits.com]{"entity":"email_address","value":"cheese@biscuits.com"}
    - [something@gmail.com] is my email address{"entity":"email_address","value":"something@gmail.com"}
    - [thing@something.com]{"entity":"email_address","value":"thing@something.com"}
    - [beans@nothing.org]{"entity":"email_address","value":"beans@nothing.org"}
    - it's [box@giraffe.co.uk]{"entity":"email_address","value":"box@giraffe.co.uk"}

This is how my intents are set up in domain.yml:

intents:
  - deny
  - my_email_address:
      use_entities:
        - email_address
      ignore_entities:
        - name

And here are my slots and forms (I’ve removed a few that weren’t relevant):

slots:
  email_address:
    type: text
    influence_conversation: true
  ticket_number:
    type: text
    influence_conversation: false
  user_query:
    type: text
    influence_conversation: false


forms:
  ticket_form:
    required_slots:
      email_address:
        - type: from_entity
          entity: email_address
        # Specifying from_text after from_entity will make rasa fallback to fill
        # the slot with any text the user utters, even if it can't recognise as
        # an email entity, as long as it doesn't match not_intents
        - type: from_text
          not_intent: [""deny"]

The user is asked to give their email address using a response called utter_ask_ticket_form_email_address.

The form works correctly if I use any of the examples written into stories.yml. But often if I don’t use the same values, it doesn’t correctly extract the email address.

For example, if after being asked the email address the user responds it's box@giraffe.co.uk the email_address slot is correctly filled with box@giraffe.co.uk.

But if the user responds it's chenee@gmail.com it falls back to incorrectly filling the email_address slot with it's chenee@gmail.com

Do I just need to add lots and lots more intent examples with different email addresses in nlu.yml, or is there another way to reliably extract an email address?

Thanks.

2

My original post got hidden by the spam filter for a while.

Is it best to train the NLU to recognise an email address with lots of entity examples of email addresses, or is there a way to specifically define a rule for seeing something as an email address?

3

Hi, you could add more examples, but since email addresses have a given structure and it’s important for this to be reliable, it’s probably easiest to write a rule (you could use RegexEntityExtractor for that) or use DucklingEntityExtractor:

- name: DucklingEntityExtractor
  url: http://localhost:8000
  dimensions:
  - email

Ideally, you’d also validate the email in a slot validation method. You can check how we do this in one of our demo bots here

4

@fkoerner thank you very much! Yes, using a specific entity extractor (I tried duckling and it worked well) is exactly what I needed to do.

5

@justyn excellent, glad to hear it!