5 ms·

Rasa NLU: Open-source bot tool for natural language understanding

136 points by geospeck 10y ago

niklasber 10y ago
Seems like it doesn't say anywhere which language(s) it support? Guessing it's English only.
- tyingq 10y ago
  http://rasa-nlu.readthedocs.io/en/latest/config.html http://rasa-nlu.readthedocs.io/en/latest/config.html "language : language of your app, can be en (English) or de (German)."
Maarten88 10y ago
This is interesting, I've been using LUIS for some time now and an open source alternative - especially one that is drop-in API compatible - is very welcome. However I can't find any information in the docs on how comparable the results are (i.e. does it have built-in date and time entity recognition like LUIS?). Most importantly: what languages does this support? All examples are in english-only. Is it even language aware, or do you train a model in any language? I'd be very interested if this were to support languages that LUIS does not have (like my language: Dutch)
- tmbo 10y ago
  Currently it supports english and german. In general we need a word embedding for each language. If that has been created by someone else, it's rather easy to integrate new languages.
- bendyBus 10y ago
  currently there are no built-in entities like dates, times, locations etc. But really keen to set up a way for users to share models, and that would definitely include these things as well
mark_l_watson 10y ago
Looks like an interesting project, based on skilearn and spaCy. The project provides some simple training files for the domain of asking about restaurants. It would be useful to also have very large training data sets available.
IshKebab 10y ago
A while ago I looked for information on how Alexa, Wit.ai, Nuance Mix etc. do this intent classification and didn't find anything. These guys have posted a nice blog post about their approach: https://conversations.golastmile.com/do-it-yourself-nlp-for-bot-developers-2e2da2817f3d#.l62loslgd https://conversations.golastmile.com/do-it-yourself-nlp-for-... They suggest that they add the word vectors in the sentence. But it seems to me that that would make the result independent of the order of words (i.e. "when does Tesco open?" and "Open Tesco when does" are the same). I thought I had tested that and it didn't work but actually I just tried saying "Tesco open does when?" to Alexa and it said "Sorry, I don't have the business hours for Tesco". Inconclusive I'd say but interesting anyway!
- bendyBus 10y ago
  yeah you're quite right, intents are built with a bag of words model & doesn't take order into account. Entity extraction does though. If you find a case where word order is really important for getting intents right I'd love to know about it! We could find a way to make that work.
  - espadrine 10y ago
    > If you find a case where word order is really important for getting intents right This may be facetious of me, since it's still fairly uncommon, but here it is. Set up the go game, go up game the set. State the ban law, ban the state law. Drive the car by the park, park the car by the drive.
  - Rabidgremlin 10y ago
    The bot I have been working on uses bag of words and n-grams to identify intents. Useful for when someone says something that may have multiple entities of the same type. For instance a journey start and end point. Can use the "from" and "to" words match better. Also very useful when training on phrases that are very similar such as FAQ questions which often have the same words but the order and one or two keys words is super important to get the right match.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Coldewey 10y ago
like the idea :-) good job!
ragebol 10y ago
Nice, I've been looking for an offline solution to do this sort of thing to run on a robot for RoboCup@Home. Perhaps http://sag.art.uniroma2.it/demo-software/huric/ http://sag.art.uniroma2.it/demo-software/huric/ might also provide some training data. It's annoying though I can't just download that corpus but have to email some guy first.
very_goord 10y ago
Great stuff, Is there a Docker support already ?
- bendyBus 10y ago
  yes! Docker Cloud isn't quite working yet but the Dockerfile should work :)
  - very_goord 10y ago
    Awesome!! Many thanks guys
espadrine 10y ago
For NLP, they use either MITIE[0] or spaCy[1]. That said, from my experience, you can get surprisingly far with simple systems; for instance, queread[2] relies on graph learning and statistics. [0]: https://github.com/mit-nlp/MITIE https://github.com/mit-nlp/MITIE [1]: https://spacy.io/ https://spacy.io/ [2]: https://github.com/espadrine/queread#workings https://github.com/espadrine/queread#workings
Rabidgremlin 10y ago
It's the "conversation" part that is really tricky... I have been working on a bot for a large Corp for the last few months and we have been using Inkle's Ink narration/dialog engine for this. Works very well. They let me open source the framework: https://github.com/rabidgremlin/Mutters https://github.com/rabidgremlin/Mutters it uses OpenNLP for intent identification and NER, Ink for conversation state and "scripting"
qhoc 10y ago
How well does this scale? Let's say I have 500MB of JSON files from restaurant info and user reviews.
- samcodes 10y ago
  I think you would have to do some processing on those, I'm pretty sure the input format has sentences classified by intent.
nrp12 10y ago
Cool stuff - was looking for Open source NLU alternatives for luis.ai. Thanks to the emulators, this fits right in. Does anyone know why rasa chose mitie/spacy and not stanfordnlp?
- bendyBus 10y ago
  we could integrate with other backends, including NLTK & coreNLP. The stanford stuff is under GPL though, prefer to promote startup-friendly licenses.

136 points by geospeck 10y ago

niklasber 10y ago

Seems like it doesn't say anywhere which language(s) it support? Guessing it's English only.

tyingq 10y ago
http://rasa-nlu.readthedocs.io/en/latest/config.html http://rasa-nlu.readthedocs.io/en/latest/config.html "language : language of your app, can be en (English) or de (German)."

Maarten88 10y ago

This is interesting, I've been using LUIS for some time now and an open source alternative - especially one that is drop-in API compatible - is very welcome. However I can't find any information in the docs on how comparable the results are (i.e. does it have built-in date and time entity recognition like LUIS?). Most importantly: what languages does this support? All examples are in english-only. Is it even language aware, or do you train a model in any language? I'd be very interested if this were to support languages that LUIS does not have (like my language: Dutch)

tmbo 10y ago
Currently it supports english and german. In general we need a word embedding for each language. If that has been created by someone else, it's rather easy to integrate new languages.
bendyBus 10y ago
currently there are no built-in entities like dates, times, locations etc. But really keen to set up a way for users to share models, and that would definitely include these things as well

mark_l_watson 10y ago

Looks like an interesting project, based on skilearn and spaCy. The project provides some simple training files for the domain of asking about restaurants. It would be useful to also have very large training data sets available.

IshKebab 10y ago

A while ago I looked for information on how Alexa, Wit.ai, Nuance Mix etc. do this intent classification and didn't find anything. These guys have posted a nice blog post about their approach: https://conversations.golastmile.com/do-it-yourself-nlp-for-bot-developers-2e2da2817f3d#.l62loslgd https://conversations.golastmile.com/do-it-yourself-nlp-for-... They suggest that they add the word vectors in the sentence. But it seems to me that that would make the result independent of the order of words (i.e. "when does Tesco open?" and "Open Tesco when does" are the same). I thought I had tested that and it didn't work but actually I just tried saying "Tesco open does when?" to Alexa and it said "Sorry, I don't have the business hours for Tesco". Inconclusive I'd say but interesting anyway!

bendyBus 10y ago
yeah you're quite right, intents are built with a bag of words model & doesn't take order into account. Entity extraction does though. If you find a case where word order is really important for getting intents right I'd love to know about it! We could find a way to make that work.
- espadrine 10y ago
  > If you find a case where word order is really important for getting intents right This may be facetious of me, since it's still fairly uncommon, but here it is. Set up the go game, go up game the set. State the ban law, ban the state law. Drive the car by the park, park the car by the drive.
- Rabidgremlin 10y ago
  The bot I have been working on uses bag of words and n-grams to identify intents. Useful for when someone says something that may have multiple entities of the same type. For instance a journey start and end point. Can use the "from" and "to" words match better. Also very useful when training on phrases that are very similar such as FAQ questions which often have the same words but the order and one or two keys words is super important to get the right match.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Coldewey 10y ago

like the idea :-) good job!

ragebol 10y ago

Nice, I've been looking for an offline solution to do this sort of thing to run on a robot for RoboCup@Home. Perhaps http://sag.art.uniroma2.it/demo-software/huric/ http://sag.art.uniroma2.it/demo-software/huric/ might also provide some training data. It's annoying though I can't just download that corpus but have to email some guy first.

very_goord 10y ago

Great stuff, Is there a Docker support already ?

bendyBus 10y ago
yes! Docker Cloud isn't quite working yet but the Dockerfile should work :)
- very_goord 10y ago
  Awesome!! Many thanks guys

espadrine 10y ago

For NLP, they use either MITIE[0] or spaCy[1]. That said, from my experience, you can get surprisingly far with simple systems; for instance, queread[2] relies on graph learning and statistics. [0]: https://github.com/mit-nlp/MITIE https://github.com/mit-nlp/MITIE [1]: https://spacy.io/ https://spacy.io/ [2]: https://github.com/espadrine/queread#workings https://github.com/espadrine/queread#workings

Rabidgremlin 10y ago

It's the "conversation" part that is really tricky... I have been working on a bot for a large Corp for the last few months and we have been using Inkle's Ink narration/dialog engine for this. Works very well. They let me open source the framework: https://github.com/rabidgremlin/Mutters https://github.com/rabidgremlin/Mutters it uses OpenNLP for intent identification and NER, Ink for conversation state and "scripting"

qhoc 10y ago

How well does this scale? Let's say I have 500MB of JSON files from restaurant info and user reviews.

samcodes 10y ago
I think you would have to do some processing on those, I'm pretty sure the input format has sentences classified by intent.

nrp12 10y ago

Cool stuff - was looking for Open source NLU alternatives for luis.ai. Thanks to the emulators, this fits right in. Does anyone know why rasa chose mitie/spacy and not stanfordnlp?

bendyBus 10y ago
we could integrate with other backends, including NLTK & coreNLP. The stanford stuff is under GPL though, prefer to promote startup-friendly licenses.