You might notice that when you update your entities that Conversation says “Watson is training on your recent changes”. What is happening is that Intents and Entities work together in the NLU engine.

So it is possible to build entities that can be referenced within your intents. Something similar to how Dialog entities. Work.

For this example I am going to use two entities.

• ENTITY_FOODSTUFF
• ENTITY_PETS

In my training questions I create the following example.

The #FoodStore question list is exactly the same, only the entity name is changed.

Next up create your entities. It doesn’t matter what the entity itself is called, only that if has one value that mentions the entity identifiers above. I have @Entity set to the same as the value for clarity.

 

“What is the point?” you might ask? Well you will notice that both entities have a value of “fish”.

When I ask “I want to get a fish” I get the following back.

• FoodStore confidence: 0.5947581078492985
• Petshop confidence: 0.4052418921507014

So Watson is not sure, as both intents could be the right answer. This is what you would expect.

Now after we delete the “fish” value from both entities, I then add the same training question “I want a fish” to both intents. After Watson has trained and I ask “I want to get a fish”, you get the following back.

• Petshop confidence: 0.9754140796608233
• FoodStore confidence: 0.02458592033917674

Oh dear, now it appears to be more confident then it should be. So entities can help in making questions ambiguous if training is not helping.

This is not without it’s limitations.

Entities are fixed keywords, and the intents will treat them as such. So while it will find “fish” in our example, it won’t recognise “fishes” unless it’s explicitly stated in the entity.

Another thing to be wary of is that all entities are used in the intents. So if a question mentioned “toast”, then @ENTITY_FOODSTUFF becomes a candidate in trying to determine which intent is correct.

The last thing to be aware of is that training questions take priority over entities when it comes to determining what is correct.

If we were to add a training question “I want fishes” to the first example. Then ask the earlier question, you would find that foodstore now takes priority. If we add “I want fishes” to both intents and ask the question “I want to get a fish”, you will get the same results as if the entities never had the word “fish” in it.

This can be handy for forcing common spelling mistakes that may not be picked up, or clearly defined domain keywords a user may enter (eg. product ID)