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

The HelloWorld example of JSF 2.2 with Myfaces

I just did by myself create a very simple app "HelloWorld" of JSF 2.2 with a concrete implementation Myfaces that we can use it later on for our further JSF trying out. I attached the source code link at the end part. Just follow these steps below: 1. Create a Maven project in Eclipse (Kepler) with a simple Java web application archetype "maven-archetype-webapp". Maven should be the best choice for managing the dependencies , so far. JSF is a web framework that is the reason why I chose the mentioned archetype for my example. 2. Import dependencies for JSF implementation - Myfaces (v2.2.10) into file pom.xml . The following code that is easy to find from  http://mvnrepository.com/  with key words "myfaces". <dependency> <groupId>org.apache.myfaces.core</groupId> <artifactId>myfaces-api</artifactId> <version>2.2.10</version> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>org.apache.myfaces.core<...
Post a Comment
Read more

The power of acceptance test

User Story is the place PO gives his ideas about features so that developers are able to know what requirements are. Acceptance tests are these show the most valuable things of the features represented by some specific cases. Usually PO defines them, but not always. Therefore, refining existing acceptance tests – even defining new ones that cover all features of the User Story must be a worth task. Acceptance test with Given When Then pattern If we understand what we are going to do, we can complete it by 50% I have worked with some members those just start implementing the features one by one and from top to down of the User Story description. Be honest, I am the one used to be. What a risky approach! Because it might meet a case that is very easy to miss requirements or needs to re-work after finding any misunderstood things. I have also worked with some members those accept spending a long time to clarify the User Story. Reading carefully of whole User Story by defining...
Post a Comment
Read more

Improving the execution time of CI pipelines

Executing a large number of tests, especially integration tests, takes a lot of time. For instance, the pipeline of one of our projects for each Pull Request previously took nearly 30 minutes, including over 1 thousand test cases. This article guides you through several good techniques that we have discovered and applied to improve the time-consuming process. Parallel stages Analyze the current phases in your pipeline and categorize them in parallel. For example, we can separate the build and verify code of Node.js and Maven modules simultaneously in our Jenkins pipelines. Please mind using the setting failFast whether you want to abort the pipeline immediately. Read more: Parallel stages with Declarative Pipeline 1.2 (jenkins.io) Parallel test execution If you use Maven, t he plugin maven-failsafe-plugin is used to execute integration tests during phases integration-test and verify  the build lifecycle. It allows us to execute tests in parallel. There are many settings related ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mindset at work

Fansipan mountain As a mentor, I always give to my new members the following practices as my advice for mindset at work. “A over B” means while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. Solution   over Technology We should approach to solve the problems rather than depending on technologies. The technology limitation should not our excuse to reduce the quality of the feature. For example, we’re strong at React, but we are willing to learn a new framework Meteor due to customer needs. We are software engineers, we are good at problem-solving. Technologies are our toolbox. Contribution   over Complaint When we encounter and find pain-in-the-ass issues such as lacking documentation, old frameworks/libs, lacking testing, etc.. we try our best to resolve them! Refer to The Boy Scout Rule: “Always leave the campground cleaner than you found it.” Collaboration   over Following Sometimes you even need to consult customers to bring great custom...
Post a Comment
Read more