Naming Intents

How should you name intents? Heres one way and an explanation as to why.

In this post we described clustering a topic into intents. The naming scheme I used was TopicIntent.

When you go to improve accuracy you will merge and split intents. You tend not to do this outside Topics. I find that if you have the topic name in the intent when you do these changes it is easier to keep your brain in one context.

Cluster Topics

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." the Anna Karenina principle

Some Topics cover loads but you don't really care about the individual intents inside. For example if you have a Complaints topic that could cover all sorts of things people moan about.

No one wants a message back saying "This robot cares we have lost your bags". A complaint question will have to be passed onto a person. If we can tell that person that we have a complaint they can then decide what to do next. If you do not break down complaint topic into intents though all sorts of questions will be in one intent. It will deal with damage, delays, queues, lost items, dirty conditions etc. This giant varied intent will suck in other questions damaging your overall system accuracy.

With a varied topic like complaints that your chatbot cannot handle by itself. If you make one giant intent it will damage your overall accuracy. But because complaints tend to be about a few things at once, 'The food was terrible and the portions were small', there is often not one solid intent anyway. By labelling all complaints ComplaintIntent it is possible to ignore the intent part as getting the topic right is good enough.

In our accuracy tests we can strip the intent part off and say that if we land in Complaint that is good enough. But not create on giant intent that covers too much and that will suck in all other questions.

This issue of big topic particularly happens with Off Topic topics where questions are out of scope, silly or just cover large areas that you can't really answer.

There are other ways to label intents. This TopicIntent method is what I use. If you have a different way please mention it in the comments.