Training a flowing conversation: long stories, or lots of shorter ones?

Rasa Open Source
1

If I am training a bot to answer simple questions that may or may not have followups, is it better to make say, 10 different stories that try to follow all anticipated conversation paths, or set up a few shorter stories that are a quick intent/response/listen setup, and let the engine select a next possible story based on context?

An example would be:

Conversation 1:
User: Tell me about magical effects
Bot: Oh those do magic things
User: Are there many of those?
Bot: No, just a few
User: How do I use them?
Bot: Access the magic menu by...

Conversation 2:
User: Tell me about magical effects
Bot: Oh those do magic things
User: How about types of weapons?
Bot: There are four main types of...
User: Ok, what kind of swords are there?
Bot: Just one, this game sucks

Conversation 3:
User: Tell me about magical effects
Bot: Oh those do magic things
User: Are there many of those?
Bot: No, just a few
User: Ok tell me about weapons then
Bot: There are four main types...

In the above three examples the conversation takes different paths. With the ‘more stories’ method, I’d have a story that answers, then anticipates followup questions, or one that answers, then changes subjects, then answers a followup to that, or in the last example, answers, does a followup, then changes topics.

Or would it be better to train a story answering the one question, handling a change in topic, and a third answering a followup question, and the engine would follow story-to-story?

If my question isn’t making sense please let me know I’ll try and clarify.

2

My answer may not be what you want exactly, but I’d say implement all of these approaches :slight_smile:

The best way to do so in my opinion is via Interactive Learning.

3

That won’t confuse the issue, having multiple copies of the same scenarios?

4

No, on the contrary.

As long as the bot’s actions don’t contradict each other, it’s fine (e.g. having action_a as a response to intent_a in a story, but having action_b as a response to intent_a in another story, everything else is fine).

5

Aah cool, thanks. I’ll give that a shot.

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