Abstract:We describe a system for building task-oriented dialogue systems combining the in-context learning abilities of large language models (LLMs) with the deterministic execution of business logic. LLMs are used to translate between the surface form of the conversation and a domain-specific language (DSL) which is used to progress the business logic. We compare our approach to the intent-based NLU approach predominantly used in industry today. Our experiments show that developing chatbots with our system requires significantly less effort than established approaches, that these chatbots can successfully navigate complex dialogues which are extremely challenging for NLU-based systems, and that our system has desirable properties for scaling task-oriented dialogue systems to a large number of tasks. We make our implementation available for use and further study.
Abstract:We introduce a pair of tools, Rasa NLU and Rasa Core, which are open source python libraries for building conversational software. Their purpose is to make machine-learning based dialogue management and language understanding accessible to non-specialist software developers. In terms of design philosophy, we aim for ease of use, and bootstrapping from minimal (or no) initial training data. Both packages are extensively documented and ship with a comprehensive suite of tests. The code is available at https://github.com/RasaHQ/