NLU best practice

Lynda1 · ‎02-02-2021

I have been looking for best practices on NLU, Intents, utterances. The VA is rather slow when we have the NLU turned on so need to ensure I do not slow it down more.

We are using three different modules

itsm
hrsd
procurement

Procurement is the smaller one with these intents

Requisition & Purchase Order
Invoice
System Access
Process

I was thinking of doing one topic per intent, or is it a best practice to use one intent, one topic for multiple scenarios that a user can ask.

The question really is: Does the NLU slow down as more intents are created?

Chris D · ‎02-03-2021

I don't know that performance is better with fewer intents and more utterances vs more intents and fewer utterances. Unless somebody has done specific testing and comparisons, I would take it with a grain of salt and assume that, since ServiceNow hasn't made it clear in documentation (afaik), that there are no notable performance impacts either way. All I know is that they advise something like 15+ utterances per intent.

If you're really talking 1 intent/100 utterances vs 5 intents/20 utterances, I'm thinking either way you're looking at minimal performance differences and you should be more focused on designing a good user experience than maximizing performance.

ServiceNow provides something like 20+ intents with like 20 utterances each in the ootb ITSM NLU Model.

I can tell you that from experience, having topics that are too big and complex become very unwieldy and difficult to maintain. Whenever you add/remove/move a node, it has to redraw the entire topic in VA Designer which can be VERY slow with big topics. In addition, normal sized topics generally load instantly when testing them in VA Designer and big topics can take considerable time to load, I've seen 30 seconds maybe even up to a minute.

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Neha Gupta4 · ‎04-19-2021

In NLU model training , Do you have idea how can we handle location based questions ? We have such kind of question (example : Do we have Daycare in Delhi ? can we take transfer from Delhi to Mumbai? )