Command Line Interface

The easiest way to test the abilities of the Snips NLU library is through the command line interface (CLI). The CLI is installed with the python package and is typically used by running snips-nlu <command> [args] or alternatively python -m snips_nlu <command> [args].

Creating a dataset

As seen in the tutorial section, a command allows you to generate a dataset from a language and a list of YAML files containing data for intents and entities:

snips-nlu generate-dataset en my_first_intent.yaml my_second_intent.yaml my_entity.yaml

Note

You don’t have to use separated files for each intent and entity. You could for instance merge all intents together in a single intents.yaml file, or even merge all intents and entities in a single dataset.yaml file.

This will print a JSON string to the standard output. If you want to store the dataset directly in a JSON file, you just have to pipe the previous command like below:

snips-nlu generate-dataset en my_first_intent.yaml my_second_intent.yaml my_entity.yaml > dataset.json

Check the Training Dataset Format section for more details about the format used to describe the training data.

Training

Once you have built a proper dataset, you can use the CLI to train an NLU engine:

snips-nlu train path/to/dataset.json path/to/persisted_engine

The first parameter corresponds to the path of the dataset file. The second parameter is the directory where the engine should be saved after training. The CLI takes care of creating this directory. You can enable logs by adding a -v flag.

Parsing

Finally, you can use the parsing command line to test interactively the parsing abilities of a trained NLU engine:

snips-nlu parse path/to/persisted_engine

This will run a prompt allowing you to parse queries interactively. You can also pass a single query using an optional parameter:

snips-nlu parse path/to/persisted_engine -q "my query"

Versions

Two simple commands allow to print the version of the library and the version of the NLU model:

snips-nlu version
snips-nlu model-version