Great question - following out of interest. Edit: thinking about this, I think you do have on option that may achieve what you want, though not exactly how you're thinking:
Create a simple entity for the respective brand in each intent - i.e. @PrinterA @PrinterB - then for each intent, go into the entity settings and set each as "Definite match". See my example image for one intent. This way, if a user types in "Printer A" - regardless of the other words in their utterance - it'll always match this one intent, then if a user types in "Printer B", it'll always match the other intent. (Note: if you have a third printer topic that could possibly match with either of these brand names, you're screwed D:)
Original response:
I don't think it's doable in ServiceNow's (current) implementation of NLU and I'm curious to know if this is unique or not, i.e. is it a normal thing to be able to train NLU models with negative matches?
The decent news from a UX perspective is that if the model matches a high confidence for both intents, VA should provide the user the option to choose between the two and hopefully it'd be clear to them based on the topic names.
A consideration to work around this (what I'm pretty sure is an) NLU limitation is to see if there's a way you can combine them into a single intent if they really are so similar that most utterances keep matching both intents. Note I specify intents, because you can still have multiple topics, but just do the topic switching logic within either or both topics.
Great question - following out of interest. Edit: thinking about this, I think you do have on option that may achieve what you want, though not exactly how you're thinking:
Create a simple entity for the respective brand in each intent - i.e. @PrinterA @PrinterB - then for each intent, go into the entity settings and set each as "Definite match". See my example image for one intent. This way, if a user types in "Printer A" - regardless of the other words in their utterance - it'll always match this one intent, then if a user types in "Printer B", it'll always match the other intent. (Note: if you have a third printer topic that could possibly match with either of these brand names, you're screwed D:)
Original response:
I don't think it's doable in ServiceNow's (current) implementation of NLU and I'm curious to know if this is unique or not, i.e. is it a normal thing to be able to train NLU models with negative matches?
The decent news from a UX perspective is that if the model matches a high confidence for both intents, VA should provide the user the option to choose between the two and hopefully it'd be clear to them based on the topic names.
A consideration to work around this (what I'm pretty sure is an) NLU limitation is to see if there's a way you can combine them into a single intent if they really are so similar that most utterances keep matching both intents. Note I specify intents, because you can still have multiple topics, but just do the topic switching logic within either or both topics.
