Rule policies will not fire if unrelated featurized slots are set

Product feedback submission from @rgstephens

Who is the feedback from?

Multiple customers

What is the feedback?

Rule policies will not fire if unrelated featurized slots are set. This behavior is counterintuitive and not documented.

What problem are they trying to solve?

A simple rule like this should work if a featurized slot is set:

- rule: greet
 steps:
 - intent: greet
 - action: utter_greet

Repo with more details

Slack thread

Recommendation

• Assign two researcher to this issue

Possible Inelegant Workaround

• Add a rule for every possible slot state

Possible Solutions

• Make the state of slot featurization explicit in the rules (e.g. none or any)

Definition of Done In order of urgency:

• See whether suggested workaround will resolve immediate customer problem
• Understand customer context: who does this affect?
• Identify consequences: what would change if this suggested behavior change were implemented?
• Identify possible alternative next steps to be refined and scoped later, likely to include more explicit definition of rule behavior

Instead of the above steps, @samsucik carried out an investigation to pin-point the bug and, while doing so, proposed a simple fix (implemented in #9475), which has been verified to fix the issue on all examples provided by @rgstephens. The discussion inspired related improvements to our docs and another bug report.

@samsucik to coordinate who is doing what on this issue @kedz assigned reviewer

[provwilliamnagy]

I’m one of the customers experiencing the issue and I think the core issue (or at least the part that’s causing me problems) is actually caused by the fact that the featurized categorical slot has an allowable value of none (in my case, the allowed values are none, single, multiple). I thought those were being treated as strings but perhaps something in the Python code is confusing it and treating it as None even though it was specified in the YAML. If I rename that value in the category to something like nada, it doesn’t appear in the compiled rules…

[samsucik]

Fyi the bug report for the initial_value issue now lives here: #9483 .