Should asking about someone's birthday and asking about someone's height be the same intent

Rasa Open Source
1

I am working on a bot that can go to Wikipedia and extract some information of a specific person.

My problem is that should i use only 1 intent to cover every possible ways for asking an attribute of a specific person. Or should I use different intents for each kind of attribute.

If I put them all in 1 intent, there would be so many variations, but if I make them multiple intents, there would be a lot of intents (cause we have many kind of attribute).

Anyone faced the same problem? If you did, how did you resolve it?

2

If your use case is small then have a single intent e.g. provide_information and then have the crf or other entity extractors distinguish between what kind of information is being provided.

So then the user can say something like: “I am a 5 foot 5 inch single male living in California.” and if your training data is good this should return:

intent: provide_information
entities: 
height: 5 foot 5 inch
gender: male
GPE: California
marital_status: single
3

Maybe I didn’t convey my problem clearly. My bot is a bot that can answer questions from users. Those question can be. “How old is Einstein?”, “How tall is Ronaldo?”, “Tell me Donald Trump’s birthday”. I mean should I put all of those questions in 1 intent, cause they are all asking about a specific kind of attribute (“age”, “height”, “birthday”) of a specific person. Or should I use multiple intents (ask_height, ask_age, ask_birthday). I think my examples is now pretty clear to tell what I mean.

4

I’d suggest trying separate intents, and just extracting the peoples names as entities

5

I am facing a similar “problem”, I would like to create a bot that can train itself using pretrained data (that is created from a database that is inserted before hand). So having one intent to carry out many operations would be helpful if possible.

For example I would like to help provide people the ability to access information regarding the whereabouts of the nearest hospital without having to insert intents one by one telling the machine that it is looking for a hospital in particular. My hope is that by using look up tables coupled with a little program that could autogenerate sentences this would be possible.

6

@khanhduynguyenhoang Ahh, I see what you mean. Yes you should definitely have multiple intents.

The intents you have look perfect:

ask_height
ask_age
ask_birthday

And like @akelad said extract the persons name via an entity - so your training data would look something like this:

## ask_age
- How old is [Einstein](name)?
- Can you tell me the age of [Ronaldo](name)?

Also I believe duckling or spacy has a “PERSONS” entity which is good at extracting names if they capitalized properly.