Knowledge Base Actions

Warning

This feature is experimental. We introduce experimental features to get feedback from our community, so we encourage you to try it out! However, the functionality might be changed or removed in the future. If you have feedback (positive or negative) please share it with us on the forum.

Using ActionQueryKnowledgeBase

Create a Knowledge Base

The data used to answer the user’s requests will be stored in a knowledge base. A knowledge base can be used to store complex data structures. We suggest you get started by using the InMemoryKnowledgeBase. Once you want to start working with a large amount of data, you can switch to a custom knowledge base (see Creating Your Own Knowledge Base).

To initialize an InMemoryKnowledgeBase, you need to provide the data in a json file. The following example contains data about restaurants and hotels. The json structure should contain a key for every object type, i.e. "restaurant" and "hotel". Every object type maps to a list of objects – here we have a list of 3 restaurants and a list of 3 hotels.

{
    "restaurant": [
        {
            "id": 0,
            "name": "Donath",
            "cuisine": "Italian",
            "outside-seating": true,
            "price-range": "mid-range"
        },
        {
            "id": 1,
            "name": "Berlin Burrito Company",
            "cuisine": "Mexican",
            "outside-seating": false,
            "price-range": "cheap"
        },
        {
            "id": 2,
            "name": "I due forni",
            "cuisine": "Italian",
            "outside-seating": true,
            "price-range": "mid-range"
        }
    ],
    "hotel": [
        {
            "id": 0,
            "name": "Hilton",
            "price-range": "expensive",
            "breakfast-included": true,
            "city": "Berlin",
            "free-wifi": true,
            "star-rating": 5,
            "swimming-pool": true
        },
        {
            "id": 1,
            "name": "Hilton",
            "price-range": "expensive",
            "breakfast-included": true,
            "city": "Frankfurt am Main",
            "free-wifi": true,
            "star-rating": 4,
            "swimming-pool": false
        },
        {
            "id": 2,
            "name": "B&B",
            "price-range": "mid-range",
            "breakfast-included": false,
            "city": "Berlin",
            "free-wifi": false,
            "star-rating": 1,
            "swimming-pool": false
        }
    ]
}

Once the data is defined in a json file, called, for example, data.json, you will be able to use this data file to create your InMemoryKnowledgeBase, which will be passed to the action that queries the knowledge base.

Every object in your knowledge base should have at least the "name" and "id" fields to use the default implementation. If it doesn’t, you’ll have to customize your InMemoryKnowledgeBase.

Define the NLU Data

In this section:

• we will introduce a new intent, query_knowledge_base
• we will annotate mention entities so that our model detects indirect mentions of objects like “the first one”
• we will use synonyms extensively

For the bot to understand that the user wants to retrieve information from the knowledge base, you need to define a new intent. We will call it query_knowledge_base.

We can split requests that ActionQueryKnowledgeBase can handle into two categories: (1) the user wants to obtain a list of objects of a specific type, or (2) the user wants to know about a certain attribute of an object. The intent should contain lots of variations of both of these requests:

## intent:query_knowledge_base
- what [restaurants](object_type:restaurant) can you recommend?
- list some [restaurants](object_type:restaurant)
- can you name some [restaurants](object_type:restaurant) please?
- can you show me some [restaurant](object_type:restaurant) options
- list [German](cuisine) [restaurants](object_type:restaurant)
- do you have any [mexican](cuisine) [restaurants](object_type:restaurant)?
- do you know the [price range](attribute:price-range) of [that one](mention)?
- what [cuisine](attribute) is [it](mention)?
- do you know what [cuisine](attribute) the [last one](mention:LAST) has?
- does the [first one](mention:1) have [outside seating](attribute:outside-seating)?
- what is the [price range](attribute:price-range) of [Berlin Burrito Company](restaurant)?
- what about [I due forni](restaurant)?
- can you tell me the [price range](attribute) of [that restaurant](mention)?
- what [cuisine](attribute) do [they](mention) have?
 ...

Create an Action to Query your Knowledge Base

To create your own knowledge base action, you need to inherit ActionQueryKnowledgeBase and pass the knowledge base to the constructor of ActionQueryKnowledgeBase.

class MyKnowledgeBaseAction(ActionQueryKnowledgeBase):
    def __init__(self):
        knowledge_base = InMemoryKnowledgeBase("data.json")
        super().__init__(knowledge_base)

Whenever you create an ActionQueryKnowledgeBase, you need to pass a KnowledgeBase to the constructor. It can be either an InMemoryKnowledgeBase or your own implementation of a KnowledgeBase (see Creating Your Own Knowledge Base). You can only pull information from one knowledge base, as the usage of multiple knowledge bases at the same time is not supported.

This is the entirety of the code for this action! The name of the action is action_query_knowledge_base. Don’t forget to add it to your domain file:

actions:
- action_query_knowledge_base

How It Works

ActionQueryKnowledgeBase looks at both the entities that were picked up in the request as well as the previously set slots to decide what to query for.