Conversational concepts for Tock
This page presents and popularizes the main concepts and conversational terminology used in Tock and its documentation.
A table also offers equivalences and similar terms in other conversational solutions.
Basic notions
Application
In pure NLP mode (language recognition), an application corresponds to a corpus of qualified sentences from which Tock will draw a set of statistical models (allowing it to analyze and interpret user sentences).
In conversational mode, the application also includes different parameters defining the responses and behavior of the bot. In other words, an application generally corresponds to a bot.
See Tock Studio > Settings > Applications.
Configuration
In a Tock application in NLP mode, a configuration groups one or more connectors for different channels (see below).
In conversational mode, a configuration corresponds to a set of responses and behaviors of the bot on these channels. For example, for the same scenario (story) of the application it is possible to configure different responses (answers, story rules, etc.) according to several configurations.
See Tock Studio > Settings > Configurations.
Connector
A connector allows Tock to "connect" a bot to an external channel such as Messenger, Alexa, a website, etc.
Its detailed configuration depends on the channel concerned.
Tock makes it very easy to share the code of a bot so that it responds on several channels thanks to its connectors. However, it is possible to fine-tune responses and behaviors depending on the connector, if needed.
See Tock Studio > Settings > Configurations and the Bot Multichannel page to learn more about the available connectors.
Namespace
The namespace is used to identify the organizational group of an object.
The namespace usually appears as a prefix followed by : in a string.
For example, an entity typed duckling:datetime is of type datetime in the namespace duckling (it comes
from the Duckling module).
If you are using the demo platform, your namespace is your GitHub identifier.
While most objects and settings depend on an application that itself belongs to a namespace, some objects such as answers are directly attached to the namespace: they are therefore shared between the applications in this namespace.
See Tock Studio > Settings > Namespaces.
Intentions
To be able to define actions following a user request, it is first necessary to classify or categorize this request.
What we call an intention is precisely this classification.
For example, the sentences "What's the weather like?", "Is it nice tomorrow?", "I hope it won't rain in Paris?" can all be categorized with the "weather" intention.
From the sentences manually classified by a user, Tock will automatically build a statistical model that will allow it, for a new sentence, to determine what the most likely intention is.
To take the example above, with a model made up of the three example sentences, it is likely that a new sentence of the type "What will the weather be like tomorrow?" will be automatically recognized by Tock as corresponding to the intention "weather".
See Tock Studio > Language Understanding.
Entities
Once the intention has been determined, it is often useful to identify the meaning of certain words in the sentence.
In the sentence "Is it nice tomorrow?", the word "tomorrow" has a meaning that must be used to answer the question in a relevant way.
We call entities these significant words in the sentence.
An entity has a type and a role. For example, in the sentence "I leave at 11am and I arrive at 6pm", the words "at 11am" and "at 6pm" are both entities of type 'datetime' but "11am" will have a role departure where "6pm" will have a role arrive. In cases where the role does not provide additional information, it is often equal to the type.
There are two steps in taking an entity into account:
- Identification: what are the words in the sentence that constitute the entity
- Valorization: what is the value of this entity. For example, how to translate "at 11am" into a system date.
By default, Tock identifies the entity, but does not value it, except for certain types. By default, entities in the namespace "duckling" will be automatically valued.
See Tock Studio > Language Understanding.
Scenario (or Story)
A scenario or story is a functional grouping that allows you to answer questions on a well-defined subject.
It is generally initiated by a main intention and can also use, optionally, a tree of so-called "secondary" intentions.
To take the weather example, to someone asking "What's the weather like?", it can be useful to ask the question of where they are.
This question will be taken into account in the "weather" story since it is only an extension of the initial question.
The Story is the main unit of the Tock conversational framework.
See Tock Studio > Stories & Answers.
Terms & Mappings
The tables below provide mappings between terms used in Tock and other conversational solutions:
| Tock | DialogFlow | Alexa | Watson |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intent | Intent | Intent | Intent |
| Entity | Entity | Entity / Slot Value | Entity |
| Sentence | Query | Utterance / Slot | Message |
| Story | Context | Dialog / Node | |
| Builtin Story | Fulfillment | Request Handler | Webhook |
| Connector | Integration | Integration / Channel | |
| Configuration | |||
| Application | Project / Agent | Skill | Skill / Assistant |
| Tock | RASA | DYDU (Do You Dream Up) | Clevy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intent | Intent | Reword | Question |
| Entity | Entity | Group | |
| Sentence | User input | Sentence | Reformulation |
| Story | Story | Knowledge | Knowledge |
| Builtin Story | |||
| Connector | Channel | Channel integration | |
| Configuration | Space | ||
| Application | Domain | Bot |
The documentation of the Tock connectors also gives the correspondence with other terms specific to this or that channel.
Continue...
You can now start the next chapter: Interfaces Tock Studio.
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