TechExchange: Mastering Dynamic Entities in Oracle Digital Assistant

article by Frank Nimphius and Chris Kutler, November 2019

Oracle Digital Assistant supports three categories of entity type:

Built-in and custom entities extract a single type of information from a user message or a user prompt displayed within a conversation. Built-in entities include DATE, DURATION, NUMBER, PERSON, LOCATION, URL, YES_NO, and MAIL. Custom entities are user-defined entities that can be of the type list-of-values, entity list, derived entity, and regular expression.
Composite bag entities are intelligent custom entities that group existing entities into a business domain objects that represent an order, a customer, a product, and the like. Bag items, which are composite bag entity attributes, can be of type entity, string, attachment or location.
Dynamic entities are a new feature in Oracle Digital Assistant. They are value-list entities whose values and synonyms can be dynamically created, modified and deleted at runtime and during development.

About Dynamic Entities

Dynamic entities are value list entities for which you create, modify and delete values at runtime using Oracle Dynamic Entities REST APIs. Dynamic entities, like other entities, can be used with NLP entity extraction to find information in user messages or to validate user input against a known set of values and synonyms.

Use cases for dynamic entities are value lists that frequently change due to underlying data changes and include product catalogs, food menus, departments, events and event locations, flight tables and many more. There is no known lower limit for the frequency of changes, though given that any change to the list data in a dynamic entity is followed by a model training, you want to keep the frequency of change reasonable.

This article introduces and explains dynamic entities in Oracle Digital Assistant version 19.10 and later. A part of this article is a hands-on for you to try the feature, assuming you have access to Oracle Digital Assistant 19.10 or later.

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