Dialog Overlap

When you have overlapping questions within your dialog, you will see a task notification on Conversational AI Cloud's Tasks screen telling you how many dialog overlaps there are in your database:

When you open this task, a list of dialogs with overlaps will show:

When you click on one of the dialog overlap tasks, you will navigate to the Dialogs screen to resolve the overlapping content:

Dialog Entities and Overlap in Dialogs

When creating articles, Conversational AI Cloud allows you to define entities; lists of synonyms that broaden recognition. Entities are one of the strengths of Conversational AI Cloud's recognition of customer questions. They make sure Conversational AI Cloud will give the same answer even when end-users use a different term for the same thing. While dialogs used all other Conversational AI Cloud recognition functionality, they only used to allow the use of entities in extremely limited ways. This worked because most dialogs offer clickable options that guide people to the right answer.

If you wanted to cover some other possible scenarios, you have always been able to add extra questions, terms, and phrases to a dialog node. But in order to progress to a more open, conversational style - one where your customers are interacting with Conversational AI Cloud as if they were chatting to a person instead of clicking options - you will need the broader recognition possibilities that entities offer. That's why it's also been made possible to use entities in dialogs.

Your specific recognition, as set by the dialog options, will remain and get priority. But if there is no exact match, the underlying entities of the questions, which are set on the dialog nodes, will determine which one is selected. Be aware though, that as a consequence, you can now have overlapping questions within your dialog.

Resolve the Dialog Overlap

This overlap does not break the dialog flow if your customers click (or type in) the options! But if they use any other term that is in the entity but not explicit in one of the options, will be guided to one of the two overlapping nodes instead of dropping out of the dialog. Potentially, that could be the 'wrong' option. For example, someone typing in 'Win10' might be guided to the 'MacOS' node.

If you wish to avoid this, you may want to split up the one big 'OS' entity into one for 'Windows' and one for 'Apple' and/or 'Other OS'. For that you can find the entity in the entities screen and split it up into two separate entities.

Examine the Dialog Overlap

You can examine overlapping dialog nodes in the dialogs editor. These will appear with an alert as can be seen in the examples below.

A dialog overlap can happen two different ways:

1. Overlapping question in nodes

Cause: If two dialog nodes contain the same question, it will result in an overlap.

Solution: Resolve this overlap by removing the "calzone" question from the pizza node.

2. Entity causing an overlap in dialogs

Cause: Take notice that there is only one question in each node. If you see an overlap like this in your nodes, the cause is most likely caused by an entity.

Solution: In this example, you would need to find out which entity is causing the overlap. This can be done via the entities screen. Here we see one entity that contains the words "Calzone" and "Pizza". To resolve the overlapping dialog nodes, you would remove the overlap from the entity and then create two separate entities: one for pizza and one for calzone.