My interaction model contains a number of synonymous terms – for example, “show”, “episode”, and “broadcast”.
When an intent phrase contains more than one term with synonyms, this results in a combinatoric explosion of the number of examples I need to provide.
It occurs to me that a cleaner solution might be to make each synonym a custom slot type, and then simply not use the value from that slot. Theoretically, the language model should then accept all the possible combinations.
So far, it does seem to work on Alexa. Conceptually it ought to work on other platforms. Guess I’ll find out…
((The other thing I’m wrestling with at the moment is the question of whether ordinal values – “the third” – get matched as dates or numbers. Current evidence is that Alexa is preferring to understand it as a date, when the grammar doesn’t make clear which was intended… so I’m going to have to define my expected phrases a bit more carefully to allow for that. Not Jovo’s fault, just the nature of NLP.))