How to train watson conversation service?

Question

I'm evaluating watson and part of this to upload Wikipedia data and then ask questions of this data. To achieve this I create a conversation service :

Note the text : 'You can input: Your domain expertise in the form of intents, entities and crafted conversation'

My understanding was that I could upload piece of text , in this case a wikipedia article' and then train watson on this text. After training I can then ask questions of watson in relation to the text.

This article seems to suggest this : https://developer.ibm.com/answers/questions/11659/whats-the-easiest-way-to-populate-a-corpus-with-content-like-wikipedia-or-twitter.html with regard to uploading data 'You could always pull the latest wikipedia dump and upload it. You do the upload through the experience manager, which is a web UI.'.

Reading https://developer.ibm.com/answers/questions/29133/access-to-watson-experience-manager-and-watson-developer-portal.html states : 'Currently Watson Experience Manager is only available to Watson Ecosystem and Watson Developer Cloud Enterprise partners.' The article is dated 2014, is this still valid ? I cannot upload a piece of text and train watson against this unless I'm a 'Watson Ecosystem and Watson Developer Cloud Enterprise' partner ? My only alternative is to train watson using 'intents, entities and crafted conversation' ?

Answer 1

Watson conversation service has three components to it.

1. Intents. These are questions with an "intent" key. For example "I can't log in" would have an intent of USER_ACCESS. For more details on this, read up on the NLC service .

2. Entities. These are keywords that share a common theme. For example: Weather is "sunny, rain, cloudy".

3. Dialog. This is the conversational flow or answers to questions asked in relation to Intent + Entity.

The conversation service documentation has a demo which explains it better. There is also a useful blog post outlining how to get started in six steps , and a video demonstrating how to quickly build a chatbot .

If it is a case where you want to analyse documents, there is Watson Explorer or Retrieve & Rank.

In relation to Watson Experience Manager. That is the older pre-bluemix version of Watson. It is no longer accessible. It had the functionality of NLC, Dialog, Retrieve & Rank, Document Conversion.