Handle custom fields from an NLU Message

A forum user (post) brought up a good point that at the moment if you build a custom NLU component, you have to put any additional information (like sentiment) into the entities key of the Message for the formation to be passed onto the dialogue manager.

A sentiment component right now should return output like this:

{ ‘intent’:

{ ‘name’:‘greet’, ‘confidence’:0.44503513568867775 }

, ‘entities’:[

{ ‘value’:‘neg’, ‘confidence’:0.9933702940854111, ‘entity’:‘sentiment’, ‘extractor’:‘sentiment_extractor’ }

}

It would be more intuitive to have this information in a separate field since sentiment isn’t really an entity:

{ “intent”:

{ “name”: “foo”, “confidence”: 0.1234567890 }

, “entities”: [], “sentiment”: [

{ “value”: “NEUTRAL”, “score”: 0.123, “confidence”: 0.897 }

], }

On the NLU side the Message class would already allow this extra field (only on the master branch of rasa though) - see here. But I’m not sure whether the dialogue manager will handle that properly.

@degiz said he would look into this when he’s back from vacation

[degiz]

Exalate commented:

degiz commented:

@mjaycub added the low one for now, doesn’t seem to be burning.

[akelad]

Exalate commented:

akelad commented:

So what I meant in this situation is that UserMessage (from the channel definition, which is the one that gets put in the tracker) actually has a metadata field at the moment. But the tracker.latest_message method doesn’t even let you access that right now, only the parse data. That’s actually a separate issue as well, that to access any metadata you assign there you have to iterate through the tracker events.

But yeah so what I’m saying is that we use a key like metadata, where users could provide extra NLU attributes. And I guess that would then be accessible from tracker.latest_message.get("metadata"). Or we actually fill the UserMessage metadata field with that as well, kind of depends.