What's the best way to extract multiple entities within the same intent and retrieve its numerical value?

Rasa Open Source
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Hi! I’m new to Rasa and I’ve been looking at ways to extract values that fall into the same entity and convert them into a numerical value.

Using the following example I want to extract the quantity for the items retrieved in the intent.

“Give me two small pizzas with mushrooms and a large pepperoni”

This user’s intent could be divided into the following entities: Give me [two]{“entity”: “quantity”, “group”: “1”} [small]{“entity”: “size”, “group”: “1”} pizzas with [mushrooms]{“entity”: “topping”, “group”: “1”} and [a]{“entity”: “quantity”, “group”: “2”} [large]{“entity”: “size”, “group”: “2”} [pepperoni]{“entity”: “topping”, “group”: “2”}

But how would I go about obtaining a numerical value for the quantities? I could probably use a custom action with a duckling python wrapper like pyduckling but I don’t really want to have more dependencies than needed and I don’t feel like this is the right approach to the problem. At least, not the most Rasa way of doing things.

I have tried Rasa’s DucklingEntityExtractor but since I’m extracting two entities on the same intent, it essentially assigns a value to the slot with the first entity extraction, and then replaces the slot’s value with the value of the second entity. Making it so I cannot retrieve the value for each individyal entity.

What’s the best way to extract both quantity entities without losing any of them and retrieve its numerical value?

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So it looks like you’re successfully extracting the entities, your question seems to be more “how can I extract the same entity and store it to different slots in a single intent”, right?

You could use a list slot for this (there’s some discussion here: How to pupulate a slot of type list - #4 by ganeshv) but you’ll probably need to write a little custom code to assign the right qualities to the right order.

Another question to consider is: is this a pattern you’re seeing users try? If it is, then it definitely makes sense to try and address it now even if it takes a bit of finagling. If it’s not & something you think they might do, then I’d skip working on it until you have good evidence that it’s functionality that folks want. (As a just-in-case measure, you could include a rule that detects multiple intents and asks the user to list items in their order one-at-a-time.)

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