These docs are for version 1.x of Rasa Open Source.

## User Guide

- [Installation](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/user-guide/installation/)
- [Tutorial: Rasa Basics](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/user-guide/rasa-tutorial/)
- [Tutorial: Building Assistants](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/user-guide/building-assistants/)
- [Command Line Interface](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/user-guide/command-line-interface/)
- [Architecture](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/user-guide/architecture/)
- [Messaging and Voice Channels](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/user-guide/messaging-and-voice-channels/)
- [Testing Your Assistant](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/user-guide/testing-your-assistant/)
- [Setting up CI/CD](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/user-guide/setting-up-ci-cd/)
- [Validate Data](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/user-guide/validate-files/)
- [Configuring the HTTP API](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/user-guide/configuring-http-api/)
- [Deploying Your Rasa Assistant](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/user-guide/how-to-deploy/)
- [Cloud Storage](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/user-guide/cloud-storage/)

## NLU

- [About](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/nlu/about/)
- [Using NLU Only](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/nlu/using-nlu-only/)
- [Training Data Format](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/nlu/training-data-format/)
- [Language Support](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/nlu/language-support/)
- [Choosing a Pipeline](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/nlu/choosing-a-pipeline/)
- [Components](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/nlu/components/)
- [Entity Extraction](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/nlu/entity-extraction/#)

## Core

- [About](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/core/about/)
- [Stories](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/core/stories/)
- [Domains](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/core/domains/)
- [Responses](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/core/responses/)
- [Actions](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/core/actions/)
- [Reminders and External Events](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/core/reminders-and-external-events/)
- [Policies](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/core/policies/)
- [Slots](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/core/slots/)
- [Forms](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/core/forms/)
- [Retrieval Actions](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/core/retrieval-actions/)
- [Interactive Learning](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/core/interactive-learning/)
- [Fallback Actions](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/core/fallback-actions/)
- [Knowledge Base Actions](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/core/knowledge-bases/)

## Conversation Design

- [Dialogue Elements](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/dialogue-elements/dialogue-elements/)
- [Small Talk](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/dialogue-elements/small-talk/)
- [Completing Tasks](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/dialogue-elements/completing-tasks/)
- [Guiding Users](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/dialogue-elements/guiding-users/)

## API Reference

- [Action Server](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/api/action-server/)
- [HTTP API](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/api/http-api/)
- [Jupyter Notebooks](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/api/jupyter-notebooks/)
- [Agent](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/api/agent/)
- [Custom NLU Components](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/api/custom-nlu-components/)
- [Rasa SDK](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/api/rasa-sdk/)
- [Events](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/api/events/)
- [Tracker](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/api/tracker/)
- [Tracker Stores](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/api/tracker-stores/)
- [Event Brokers](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/api/event-brokers/)
- [Lock Stores](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/api/lock-stores/)
- [Training Data Importers](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/api/training-data-importers/)
- [Featurization of Conversations](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/api/core-featurization/)
- [TensorFlow Configuration](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/api/tensorflow_usage/)
- [Migration Guide](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/migration-guide/)
- [Rasa Open Source Change Log](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/changelog/)

## Migrate from (beta)

- [Dialogflow](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/migrate-from/google-dialogflow-to-rasa/)
- [Wit.ai](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/migrate-from/facebook-wit-ai-to-rasa/)
- [LUIS](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/migrate-from/microsoft-luis-to-rasa/)
- [IBM Watson](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/migrate-from/ibm-watson-to-rasa/)

## Reference

- [Glossary](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/glossary/)

## Versions

viewing: 1.10.0

# Entity Extraction

Entity extraction involves parsing user messages for required pieces of information. Rasa Open Source provides entity extractors for custom entities as well as pre-trained ones like dates and locations. Here is a summary of the available extractors and what they are used for:

| Component | Requires | Model | Notes |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| `CRFEntityExtractor` | sklearn-crfsuite | conditional random field | good for training custom entities |
| `SpacyEntityExtractor` | spaCy | averaged perceptron | provides pre-trained entities |
| `DucklingHTTPExtractor` | running duckling | context-free grammar | provides pre-trained entities |
| `MitieEntityExtractor` | MITIE | structured SVM | good for training custom entities |
| `EntitySynonymMapper` | existing entities | N/A | maps known synonyms |
| `DIETClassifier` |  | conditional random field<br>on top of a transformer | good for training custom entities |

## [The “entity” Object](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/nlu/entity-extraction/#the-entity-object)

After parsing, an entity is returned as a dictionary. There are two fields that show information about how the pipeline impacted the entities returned: the `extractor` field of an entity tells you which entity extractor found this particular entity, and the `processors` field contains the name of components that altered this specific entity.

The use of synonyms can cause the `value` field not match the `text` exactly. Instead it will return the trained synonym.

```
{
  "text": "show me chinese restaurants",
  "intent": "restaurant_search",
  "entities": [\
    {\
      "start": 8,\
      "end": 15,\
      "value": "chinese",\
      "entity": "cuisine",\
      "extractor": "CRFEntityExtractor",\
      "confidence": 0.854,\
      "processors": []\
    }\
  ]
}
```

Note

The `confidence` will be set by the `CRFEntityExtractor` component. The `DucklingHTTPExtractor` will always return `1`. The `SpacyEntityExtractor` extractor and `DIETClassifier` do not provide this information and return `null`.

Some extractors, like `duckling`, may include additional information. For example:

```
{
  "additional_info":{
    "grain":"day",
    "type":"value",
    "value":"2018-06-21T00:00:00.000-07:00",
    "values":[\
      {\
        "grain":"day",
        "type":"value",
        "value":"2018-06-21T00:00:00.000-07:00"\
      }\
    ]
  },
  "confidence":1.0,
  "end":5,
  "entity":"time",
  "extractor":"DucklingHTTPExtractor",
  "start":0,
  "text":"today",
  "value":"2018-06-21T00:00:00.000-07:00"
}
```

### Custom Entities

Almost every chatbot and voice app will have some custom entities. A restaurant assistant should understand `chinese` as a cuisine, but to a language-learning assistant it would mean something very different. The `CRFEntityExtractor` and the `DIETClassifier` component can learn custom entities in any language, given some training data.

### Entities Roles and Groups

Assigning custom entity labels to words, allow you to define certain concepts in the data.

```
I want to fly from [Berlin](city) to [San Francisco](city).
```

However, sometimes you want to specify entities even further. Let’s assume we want to build an assistant that should book a flight for us. The assistant needs to know which of the two cities in the example above is the departure city and which is the destination city.

```
- I want to fly from [Berlin]{"entity": "city", "role": "departure"} to [San Francisco]{"entity": "city", "role": "destination"}.
```

To fill slots from entities with a specific role/group, you need to either define a custom slot mappings using [Forms](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/core/forms/#forms) or use [Custom Actions](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.10.0/core/actions/#custom-actions) to extract the corresponding entity directly from the tracker.

### Extracting Places, Dates, People, Organisations

spaCy has excellent pre-trained named-entity recognisers for a few different languages.

### Dates, Amounts of Money, Durations, Distances, Ordinals

The [duckling](https://duckling.wit.ai/) library does a great job of turning expressions like “next Thursday at 8pm” into actual datetime objects that you can use, e.g.

```
"next Thursday at 8pm"
=> {"value":"2018-05-31T20:00:00.000+01:00"}
```

### Regular Expressions (regex)

You can use regular expressions to help the CRF model learn to recognize entities.

### Passing Custom Features to `CRFEntityExtractor`

If you want to pass custom features, such as pre-trained word embeddings, to `CRFEntityExtractor`, you can add any dense featurizer to the pipeline before the `CRFEntityExtractor`.`CRFEntityExtractor` automatically finds the additional dense features and checks if the dense features are an iterable of `len(tokens)`, where each entry is a vector.

👋 I can help you get started with Rasa and answer your technical questions.
