Opening questions

It’s common for the intent used on welcome messages or beginning of a conversation with a bot to start with “how can I help?”. This is called a first state or session start. It’s best to include only phrases that actually answer this question.

Although unlikely, there are some cases where sentences do not match a first-state intent. Here are the main examples of these sentences (potential answers or incomplete variants):

1. Short sentences copied from detailed intents found in further states of the bot, e.g. To the travel policy.
2. Sentences without an utterance object, which have been replaced by a pronoun, e.g. I just unlocked it .
3. Sentences that start with affirmations and negations, e.g. Yes, I would like to buy a policy.
4. Other sentences that look like incomplete or truncated statements, e.g. I sell online. I buy and sell francs there.

Keeping these types of sentences within the intents of the first state lowers the effectiveness of the algorithm because:

1. The structures are similar to sentences for other intents found elsewhere in the bot,
2. They are dissimilar to the rest of the first state sentences (in terms of vocabulary and length), so they can be confusing to the algorithm,
3. They do not indicate an object, which is sometimes the only element that allows to distinguish similar sentences with different intents and are less informative than other sentences in a given intent (what is meant by "it" within the phrase), and therefore constitute a classification problem also for a human.