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Amblymoron
Amblymoron

Reputation: 31

Reason for an unexpcted match to an intent in Watson Assistant

I have defined an intent in Watson Assistant using the following training examples:

adieu
au revoir
bye
bye now
ciao
cu
cya
exit
farewell
good bye
have a nice day
I'm leaving
later
quit
see you
so long
stop
we are done

A user inputs the word "again". Watson returns a match to this intent with a confidence level of about .9

The word "again" does appear in a training example for a completely different intent, namely "I'm looking forward to working with you again! :)". It does not appear in any other training example.

What is the reasoning used by Watson Assistant to arrive at this match and with such a high level of confidence?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 81

Answers (1)

Simon O'Doherty
Simon O'Doherty

Reputation: 9359

There is a whole load of factors that determine why an intent is picked over the other.

  1. Intents do not work properly if you have <= 2 intents.

  2. Any entities you have created that are referenced in the example questions can also impact what is picked.

  3. Contextual entities will also add weight to the POS of those entities.

  4. Number of intents and how frequently the word is used across those intents can also impact the scoring.

  5. Watson Assistant always tries to get meaning from the term where it can.

When trying to determine why it picked one intent over another, you need to look at both. The intent you mention may not even be the second one picked.

With just one intent shown above it's hard to say the 'Why', so this is just an educated guess as to what may be happening.

  • "again" is a single word and by itself has no context to determine an intent. The closest in the list would be "later".
  • It couldn't find any meaning whatsoever in a single word, so looked at the intent with the most single word examples, as possible reason to pick it.

That aside, you should try not to answer real 1-2 keyword based questions. There is almost never any context that a person could answer, so it's unlikely WA will be able to either.

Upvotes: 1

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