Migrating from LUIS to CLU – Part 1: The Differences

If you or your business regularly use Microsoft LUIS for building and maintaining your chatbots, you’re probably aware that the various Azure Cognitive Services – Text Analytics, QnA Maker and LUIS – will be consolidated into the new Azure Cognitive Services for Language. While any active LUIS endpoints will remain functional until the 1st of October 2025, you will not be able to create new LUIS resources just a few months from now, starting on the 1st of April 2023. For that reason, it is imperative that you familiarise yourself with what’s changing in the leap from LUIS to CLU.

The first part of this blog will highlight the major differences between LUIS and CLU as a chatbot-building interface – what functions are changing, and what new features have been added. In the second part, we’ll discuss the process of migrating your bot from LUIS into CLU, and test the performance of the new machine learning algorithms Microsoft has implemented under CLU’s hood.

New and Modified Features

While you can upload your LUIS chatbot’s exported json file to CLU, or indeed transfer entire projects over, as will be detailed in part 2 of this blog, there will be certain features that are modified or no longer supported in the new CLU version of your bot. Nevertheless, CLU also comes with more features, and is driven by a new NLP model.

When it comes to chatbot building, the following changes are the most important to keep in mind when planning your upgrade to CLU:

• Punctuation and word form settings, Phrase Lists, and Patterns will no longer be supported in CLU, as the improved NLP model performance should render these configurations and extra recognition features unnecessary.
• While entities like list, regex and prebuilt entities remain largely the same, machine learned entities have been tweaked. In LUIS, entities could contain sub-entities, but in CLU each sub-entity will be treated as its own entity. So for example, a suit size entity in LUIS, named size, could contain the sub-entities waist and shoulders. On conversion to CLU, these would be treated as distinct size.waist and size.shoulders entities.
• In LUIS, new model versions are only created when the users decided to save or import one. In CLU, a new model version will be created and saved for future use during each round of training.
• There are two model training options, the relatively short “Standard” mode and the longer “Advanced” mode. We will examine these in more detail in a later section of this blog.
• CLU has the impressive ability to recognize multiple languages and train on a multi-lingual dataset.
• A confidence threshold can now be declared in the settings, below which the model will instead default to the None intent as its top-ranked response.
• During each round of training, the model’s performance will also be evaluated. This is achieved either by splitting all the training utterances into a train and test set, or by the user themselves labelling some of their utterances as part of the test set, to be held out of any training. 

The New Interface

Back in Microsoft LUIS, your intents and entities were defined in different parts of the sub-menu, and you could only view and edit the training data for one intent at a time. CLU takes a more flexible approach, with all intents and entities now listed under the “Schema Definitions” section of the menu - see Fig. 1. 

Figure 1: The “Schema definition” page in CLU, for creating new intents and entities. Clicking on one takes the user to a filtered version of the “Data labelling” page in Fig. 2.

 

Similarly, entering new training utterances and labelling entities is now all handled on a single “Data Labelling” page, shown in Fig. 2. If you wish to add your own test utterances, or move some training utterances into the test set or vice-versa, you can do this here as well. You can still filter the page by specific intents if desired.

Figure 2: The “Data labelling” page where the user can add new utterances, re-assign utterances to other intents, label entities and split utterances into training and test sets.

 

Each time a new model is trained, you can view the resulting accuracy metric and confusion matrix for both your intents and your machine-learned entities on the “Model Performance” page, illustrated in Fig. 3.

Figure 3: When a training job is selected on the “Model performance” page, it takes you to this evaluation, which gives more details on when training was done, the kind of split used and resulting precision, recall and F1 scores.

 

Advanced vs Standard Training

As mentioned in an earlier section, when a user creates a new training job in CLU. They will have the option to select either “Standard” or “Advanced” training, see Fig. 4.

Figure 4: The “Start a training job” page in CLU. Each job requires a new name, or a slot of a previous model to overwrite.

 

Standard training is fast, only taking a few minutes for each job (similar to LUIS) and is free to all users. Advanced, meanwhile, utilizes transformer models and can take considerably longer – in our testing we found a larger model on the scale of ~100 intents could take well over an hour to train – and incurs additional costs. It should, however, result in a much more accurate model. 

Unfortunately, the Standard option is currently only available in English, so if you wish to make use of CLU in other languages, or try out its multilingual capabilities, you will have to do so with Advanced training. 

For the purposes of saving both time and money, we would recommend mostly using Standard training when building your bot. Advanced training should only be reserved for final testing and deployment.

What About QBox?

And now for some great news – since CLU is now widely available, we’ve already added the ability to carry out QBox tests on CLU models!

Additional QBox core features such as Explain, DevOps and Experiment are not yet available, but if you wish to carry out automated or cross-validation testing on your new CLU-built chatbots on QBox, now you can – see example in Fig. 5.

Figure 5: Creating an automated test in QBox with a CLU .json file. Note either Standard or Advanced training options can be selected (Standard is recommended, but currently English-only)

 

If creating CLU tests in QBox, please keep in mind what was discussed in the previous section – Advanced training can be very time consuming, so if you have an English model, we recommend carrying out any tests in Standard training mode.

Enjoyed reading this blog? Then don’t forget to check out part 2 where we look at migration and comparison.