I’ve always used Pandas for getting an overview of intents, but when you are dealing at the enterprise level ( > 300 intents ), it can be a case of not being able to see the wood for the trees.

Recently I saw a nice mind map visualising intent structures (shout out to Rahul! 🙂 ). It was a manual process and a lot of work put into it.

So I looked to see if we can automate this. XMind to the rescue! There is a Python library that allows you to create through code.

First I start by setting up. You can get the ctx and workspace details from your assistant.

import xmind
from xmind.core import workbook, saver
from xmind.core.markerref import MarkerId
from xmind.core.topic import TopicElement
from watson_developer_cloud import ConversationV1
from urllib.parse import urlparse, parse_qs
import pandas as pd
import os

ctx = {
    "url": "https://gateway-fra.watsonplatform.net/assistant/api",
    "username": "USERNAME",
    "password": "PASSWORD"
}

version = '2018-07-10'
workspace = 'WORKSPACE'

xmind_file = 'intents.xmind'

The XMind library will create a file if it doesn’t exist. But if the file already exists, then it adds to it. So we need to delete it before we continue.

if os.path.exists(xmind_file): os.remove(xmind_file)

This next piece of code allows you to capture all the intents directly from the workspace. In a large scale workspace, you will generally have pages of intents, so this handles that.

wa = ConversationV1( username=ctx.get('username'), password=ctx.get('password'), version=version, url=ctx.get('url'))

j = []
x = { 'pagination': 'DUMMY' }
cursor = None
while 'pagination' in x:
    x = wa.list_intents(workspace_id=workspace, export=True,cursor=cursor)
    j.append(x['intents'])
    if 'pagination' in x and 'next_cursor' in x['pagination']:
        cursor = x['pagination']['next_cursor']
    else:
        x = {}

recs = []
for i in j: 
    for k in i: 
        record = { 
            'intent': k['intent'],
            'total': len(k['examples'])
        }
        recs.append(record)

df = pd.DataFrame(recs,columns=['intent','total'])
df = df.sort_values(by=['intent'])

This last piece of code takes the dataframe created with the question and intent, then turns it into a MindMap. Each node will display the intent name and how many examples in that intent. For intents >20 it will have a green star, while <10 will have a red star.

I am also using the first word before the underscore as the category.

x = xmind.load(xmind_file)

sheet = x.getPrimarySheet()
sheet.setTitle('Intents Summary')

root = sheet.getRootTopic()
root.setTitle('Intents')

current_id = None
for index, row in df.iterrows():
    id = row['intent'].split('_')[0]
    intent = '{} ({})'.format(row['intent'].replace('{}_'.format(id),''),row['total'])

    if id != current_id:
        topic = root.addSubTopic()
        current_id = id
        topic.setTitle(id)

    item = topic.addSubTopic()
    item.setTitle(intent)

    if row['total'] > 20:
        item.addMarker(MarkerId.starGreen)
    elif row['total'] < 10:
        item.addMarker(MarkerId.starRed)

xmind.save(x, xmind_file)
print('All done!')

Using the catalog intents as an example (and intentionally modifying/removing some) you end up with something like this:

You can build a more complex one with the examples as well, but when you are dealing with 1000’s of questions, it gets a little unwieldy.