Need help with understanding entities in NLU

[PriyanshuVerma1]

Hey everyone,

I am new at NLU implementation. I am struggling to understand the topic of entity in NLU model. Please if someone can provide with examples to understand Entity topic it would be helpful. Also i not able to understand how does entity help in intent prediction. Please provide help on this

[Aline Bueno]

The VA, via NLU, needs to understand two things: what you want to do (intent) and any specific details (entities) you mention.

Intents are your main goals or actions you want to perform, as you may have already understood. Entities are the key details in your request. They can be a plethora of different data types. You will set it when you configure which entity you are looking for in NLU.

Some examples…

1. "I want to book a travel to Sao Paolo."
1. Intent: Booking
2. Entity: Sao Paulo (location)
2. "My laptop is not working"
1. Intent: Open Incident
2. Entity: My laptop (asset)
3. "Wake me up at 6 AM tomorrow."
1. Intent: Set Alarm
2. Entity: 6 AM tomorrow (time, date)
4. "Call Paul."
1. Intent: Call
2. Entity: Paul (person/name)

The way they interact, entities provide context and specifics, which may make it easier to understand the intent. Like knowing you put a location there helps it understand that you might want to do something related to a location. But, mainly IMO, the reason for it is to populate your action with data - so you don't have to ask the user again for the same information they've already given when asking for help (e.g. When someone says "Call Paul", the NLU already understand who you are trying to call, if you only configure intent to steer the conversation to the Call action, you would have to ask who you would need to call, in which the requester would have tell again "Paul").

I hope it helped!

[Lynda1]

The main purpose we use entity for is ticket numbers. Here is a document showing how to set one up.

Create a pattern entity (servicenow.com)

Creating the entity makes it so I only need to enter one utterance with a RITM number (for example) and that will cover the full list or requests submitted. I do the same for INC, Change requests and HRC.