Rasa: Duckling Alternative?

[parthsharma1996]

ner_duckling has been deprecated and ner_duckling_http has been introduced since version 0.14. net_duckling_http requires the running of a duckling http server, which either requires docker or
haskell. Now, the hosting service(DreamHost shared VPS) we are using for deploying our chatbot neither supports docker nor Haskell. Hence we are unable to use date/time extraction.

How do I solve this? Is there any alternative to ner_duckling_http we can use?

Currently the only solution I can think of is to use an already existing datetime parser like dateparser and write a custom Rasa NLU compnent as a wrapper around it.

[akelad]

Thanks for raising this issue, @tmbo will get back to you about it soon.

[tmbo]

We needed to remove the ner_duckling component because it was using the old clojure version of duckling that has been deprecated for over a year and doesn't receive improvements anymore.

I didn't look into alternatives for the date time parsing for a while, so there might be alternatives out there that are easy to integrate, but yes in terms of an alternative the best path forward would be to create a custom component.

[parthsharma1996]

Okay, I will write a custom component using https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser . Although it doesn't seem to be as advanced as duckling in terms cases covered and features.

e.g It is unable to parse "the day after tomorrow at noon"

[mauricedoepke]

Implementing a foreign function interface for duckling eould probably be the cleanest solution.

This would need a few lines of python, a few more of haskell. And a whole research team to force ghc compiling it.

[akelad]

i'm going to close this then as the question was answered