Skip to main content

How I did customize "rasa-nlu-trainer" as my own tool


Check out my implementation here

Background

I wanted to have a tool for human beings to classify intents and extract entities of texts which were obtained from a raw dataset such as Rocket.chat's conversation, Maluuba Frames or here. Then, the output (labeled texts) could be consumed by an NLU tool such as Rasa NLU.

rasa-nlu-trainer was a potential one which I didn't need to build an app from scratch. However, I needed to add more of my own features to fulfill my needs. They were:

1. Loading/displaying raw texts stored by a database such as MongoDB
2. Manually labeling intents and entities for the loaded texts
3. Persisting labeled texts into the database

I firstly did look up what rasa-nlu-trainer's technologies were used in order to see how to implement my mentioned features.

At first glance

rasa-nlu-trainer was bootstrapped with Create React App. Create React App is a tool to create a React app with no build configuration, as it said. This tool is also recommended by the official React.js tutorial. I actually was very new to React.js. I wondered what problem Creat React App tried to solve so that I first wanted to set up a project without Create React App. I followed this post.

Well, let me say if I built a React app from scratch then I needed to do some manual configurations for Webpack and Babel including webpack.config.json and .babelrc

Then, I tried to use Create React App, and I followed this guide. All right, let me say Create React App helped me create a React boilerplate project with hiding Webpack and Babel's configuration so that as a developer I only needed to focus on writing production code.

The nuts and bolts

I went on starting to watch how rasa-nlu-trainer's source code was organized and what its techniques are used.

Folder structure

1. Auto-created stuff by Create React App
   - public/index.html
   - src/index.js
2. Overrides
   - They didn't use "react-script", they created their own way instead! That was the reason why some additional folder/files were added such as server.js, scripts and config.

Used technologies

- Programming language: Javascript
- Babel: ES6 transpiler
- Project bundle: Webpack
- Dependencies management: npm
- Backend: Node.js
- Fronted framework/project-based: React.js
- React model storing: React-Redux
- React UI extension components: Ant Design
- TypeScript

Hooray! Welcome me to Javascript world!

Architecture

- index.js: Provider{store} <---> LocaleProvider ---> App
- How "separation of concerns" works: import and  export
- Global data (store) is immutable and only changed by files actions.js and reducer.js

Proposed changes

Finally, I could start to add my needs to the existing rasa-nlu-trainer app. I listed out what my features:
- Creating an overview page as a custom React component to display all loaded texts
- Customizing the existing page for classifying intents and extracting entities.
- Implementing Node.js methods to load/stores texts (as JSON)  which stored in MongoDB

The rule of thumb was I needed to follow the mentioned architecture for modifying the global data which were managed by React-Redux.

You can take a look at the changes from this pull request.

Conclusion

Sometimes, the best way to learn new techs is to get down into an existing tool and customize it with your own needs. 💪
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Junit - Test fails on French or German string assertion

In my previous post about building a regex to check a text without special characters but allow German and French . I met a problem that the unit test works fine on my machine using Eclipse, but it was fail when running on Jenkins' build job. Here is my test: @Test public void shouldAllowFrenchAndGermanCharacters(){ String source = "ÄäÖöÜüß áÁàÀâÂéÉèÈêÊîÎçÇ"; assertFalse(SpecialCharactersUtils.isExistSpecialCharater(source)); } Production code: public static boolean isExistNotAllowedCharacters(String source){ Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("^[a-zA-Z_0-9_ÄäÖöÜüß áÁàÀâÂéÉèÈêÊîÎçÇ]*$"); Matcher matcher = regex.matcher(source); return !matcher.matches(); } The result likes the following: Failed tests: SpecialCharactersUtilsTest.shouldAllowFrenchAndGermanCharacters:32 null A guy from stackoverflow.com says: "This is probably due to the default encoding used for your Java source files. The ö in the string literal in the J...
5 comments
Read more

Math fundamentals and Katex

It was really tough for me to understand many articles about data science due to the requirements of understanding mathematics (especially linear algebra). I’ve started to gain some basic knowledges about Math by reading a book first. The great tool Typora and stackedit with supporting Katex syntax simply helps me to display Math-related symbols. Let’s start! The fundamental ideas of mathematics: “doing math” with numbers and functions. Linear algebra: “doing math” with vectors and linear transformations. 1. Solving equations Solving equations means finding the value of the unknown in the equation. To find the solution, we must break the problem down into simpler steps. E.g: x 2 − 4 = 4 5 x 2 − 4 + 4 = 4 5 + 4 x 2 = 4 9 x = 4 9 ∣ x ∣ = 7 x = 7  or  x = − 7 \begin{aligned} x^2 - 4 &= 45\\ x^2 - 4 + 4 &= 45 + 4\\ x^2 &= 49\\ \sqrt{x}&=\sqrt{49}\\ |x| &= 7\\ x=7 &\text{ or } x=-7 \end{aligned} x 2 − 4 x 2 − 4 + 4 x 2 x ​ ∣ x ∣ x = 7 ​ = 4 5 = 4 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

AngularJS - Build a custom validation directive for using multiple emails in textarea

AngularJS already supports the built-in validation with text input with type email. Something simple likes the following: <input name="input" ng-model="email.text" required="" type="email" /> <span class="error" ng-show="myForm.input.$error.email"> Not valid email!</span> However, I used a text area and I wanted to enter some email addresses that's saparated by a comma (,). I had a short research and it looked like AngualarJS has not supported this functionality so far. Therefore, I needed to build a custom directive that I could add my own validation functions. My validation was done only on client side, so I used the $validators object. Note that, there is the $asyncValidators object which handles asynchronous validation, such as making an $http request to the backend. This is just my implementation on my project. In order to understand that, I supposed you already had experiences with ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Creating a Chatbot with RiveScript in Java

Motivation "Artificial Intelligence (AI) is considered a major innovation that could disrupt many things. Some people even compare it to the Internet. A large investor firm predicted that some AI startups could become the next Apple, Google or Amazon within five years"   - Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University. Using chatbots to support our daily tasks is super useful and interesting. In fact, "Jenkins CI, Jira Cloud, and Bitbucket" have been becoming must-have apps in Slack of my team these days. There are some existing approaches for chatbots including pattern matching, algorithms, and neutral networks. RiveScript is a scripting language using "pattern matching" as a simple and powerful approach for building up a Chabot. Architecture Actually, it was flexible to choose a programming language for the used Rivescript interpreter like Java, Go, Javascript, Python, and Perl. I went with Java. Used Technologies and Tools Oracle JDK 1.8...
Post a Comment
Read more

4 Remarkable Notes for JSF Apps Using HTML5

In the previous post , I've already shared with you how my team consults clients by using a HTML prototype. This post is about the used technologies for reusing the provided HTML template and communicating with backend. What is the issue when using HTML elements with Primefaces components? Primefaces is a great extension for developing JSF web apps. However, it is really frustrating in case we have to make it work with an existing HTML template. Why? - Primefaces has its own theme for styling. - Primefaces changes the HTML structure. Therefore, that would be a huge effort to use the Primefaces' components to replicate the elements of the HTML template; especially it is impossible for images drawing by " canvas " tag. That requires us to find a better approach. Since Java EE 7 (introducing JSF 2.2 included), it supports to use HTML5 elements . The idea is that JSF components don't effect the style and HTML structure, so we can easily reuse the provided HTM...
2 comments
Read more