Entity Extraction

Introduction

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

If your pipeline includes one or more of the components above, the output of your trained model will include the extracted entities as well as some metadata about which component extracted them. The processors field contains the names of components that altered each entity.

Note

The value field can be different from what appears in the text. If you use synonyms, an extracted entity like chinees will be mapped to a standard value, e.g. chinese.

Here is an example response:

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

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"
}

Note

The confidence will be set by the CRF entity extractor (CRFEntityExtractor component). The duckling entity extractor will always return 1. The SpacyEntityExtractor extractor does not provide this information and returns null.

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 component can learn custom entities in any language, given some training data. See Training Data Format for details on how to include entities in your training data.

Extracting Places, Dates, People, Organisations

spaCy has excellent pre-trained named-entity recognisers for a few different languages. You can test them out in this interactive demo. We don’t recommend that you try to train your own NER using spaCy, unless you have a lot of data and know what you are doing. Note that some spaCy models are highly case-sensitive.

Dates, Amounts of Money, Durations, Distances, Ordinals

The duckling 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"}

The list of supported languages can be found here. Duckling can also handle durations like “two hours”, amounts of money, distances, and ordinals. Fortunately, there is a duckling docker container ready to use, that you just need to spin up and connect to Rasa NLU (see DucklingHTTPExtractor).

Regular Expressions (regex)

You can use regular expressions to help the CRF model learn to recognize entities. In your training data (see Training Data Format) you can provide a list of regular expressions, each of which provides the CRFEntityExtractor with an extra binary feature, which says if the regex was found (1) or not (0).

For example, the names of German streets often end in strasse. By adding this as a regex, we are telling the model to pay attention to words ending this way, and will quickly learn to associate that with a location entity.

If you just want to match regular expressions exactly, you can do this in your code, as a postprocessing step after receiving the response from Rasa NLU.

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