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I recently hit a thorny issue with allowing my Bot to understand names via LUIS. I tried to train the LUIS model with various utterances of, ‘how is ‘ but it really wasn’t getting anywhere. There are just so many variations of names that unless I retrieved a large name data set then this really wasn’t going to work. So I fell back to using a very specific match. Yes, that is not really in the spirit of LUIS but at least it keeps all the language models in one place. My trick is pretty simple;

Create your Intent; e.g. HowIs

Add your *specific* utterance; e.g. how is paul

Go to the Entities options and create a new Entity called ‘Name’…

Set the Entity Type to RegEx…

Add your RegEx, e.g. (?<=^.{7})(.*)

Hit train

Now when you visit your Intent you should see the name aspect labelled as ‘Name’. As I say, it’s pretty crude and frankly you don’t need LUIS to do such a match. But if you believe there is value in keeping all your language matching models in the same place then it’s the best solution I currently have.

NB I tried using a training list and Pattern and neither seemed to help