AWS Lex matches the wrong intent despite entering exact utterance

Question

I have been having this problem in a variety of different cases.

I'll share an example of one.

I have a few FAQ intents. One answers "What is Named Entity Recognition" These are it's utterances :

1. Tell me about Named Entity Recognition
2. Tell me about NER
3. What is NER
4. What do you mean by Named Entity Recognition
5. What is Named Entity Recognition

and the other answers "What is Optical Character Recognition?" These are it's utterances :

1. OCR
2. What do you mean by OCR
3. Can you tell me what OCR is
4. Tell about OCR
5. What is optical character recognition
6. What is OCR

When I enter, "What is ocr?" it works as expected and shows the answer for OCR. But when I instead enter OCR in all caps, with the same exact question (What is OCR?). It switches to the NER intent and shows me the answer for "What is NER?"

Can any one answer why it is doing so? and more important than that, What do I do to make it work as expected.

Do keep in mind that this is just one example. I have encountered this in many other similar scenarios too.

There was also a case where the intent utterances didn't seem to match even remotely. But it still switched to the wrong intent.

Answer 1

In the end I didn't find a proper solution but used some really inelegant workarounds, but hey as long as it works :D

The workaround I used was to make a "what" intent, a "how" intent etc. Keeping the sentence structure intact:

For example :

IntentName => "Bot_HowTo"

Utterances => 
"What is {slotName}"
"What are {slotName}"
"Meaning of {slotName}"

Slots =>
name : "slotName"
values (using synonyms) : 
{OCR => "ocr", Optical Character recognition"}
{NER=> "ner", Named Entity Recognition"}

This makes the amount of intents needed much less and also eliminates a lot of the ambiguity. All questions that have "what" or similar formats go straight to that intent.

And then in my codehook I see which synonym was matched and provide the answer accordingly.