The ServiceNow® Natural Language Understanding (NLU) application provides an NLU Workbench and an NLU Service that you can use to enable the system to learn and respond to human-expressed intent. Natural Language Understanding was enhanced and updated in the Vancouver release.

Natural Language Understanding highlights for the Vancouver release

  • Improve your model prediction performance by using irrelevance detection.
  • Use Dialog acts to enable flexible and natural mid-conversations in Virtual Agent.

See Natural Language Understanding for more information.

Important: Model Performance, Expert Feedback loop, Multi-model Batch testing, and Cross-model Conflict Review are available in the ServiceNow® Store. For details, see the "Activation information" section of these release notes.

New in the Vancouver release

NLU Workbench home page
Use the NLU Workbench home page that provides resources and guidance tailored to the different applications NLU is being used for, such as Virtual Agent, AI Search, and Issue Auto Resolution.
Update set improvements
The update set experience for NLU models in scoped apps has been improved, with automatic creation of batch update sets. This feature will commit both a parent update set in the application scope and a child update set in the global scope, on the target instance.
Dialog acts
Use Dialog acts to enable flexible and natural mid-conversations in Virtual Agent. Dialog acts allow NLU to use conversation contexts to understand mid-topic utterances. Affirm, negate, and modify dialog acts are only supported in English.
IAR Tuning
A new Issue Auto Resolution model tuning experience is introduced in the NLU Workbench where you can tune the prebuilt IAR-ITSM model by labelling short descriptions for some or all of the intents provided in the model. You can also optimize the model for Precision, Automation or Balance.
Irrelevant utterances
Conflicts with Irrelevant utterances, should there be any, are displayed in the conflict screen for every NLU model.

Deprecations

  • NLU support in Dev Studio is being deprecated from Vancouver. However, NLU support in Dev Studio will continue to work as is in all of the pre–Vancouver instances.
  • In this case, we recommend that customers use the NLU Workbench instead.

Activation information

Natural Language Understanding is a Now Platform feature that is available with activation of the NLU Workbench (com.snc.nlu_studio), NLU Workbench - Core (com.glide.nlu), NLU Common Model (com.glide.nlu.model), and Predictive Intelligence (com.glide.platform_ml) plugins. To get the most out of the NLU Workbench, also install the NLU Workbench - Advanced Features application from the ServiceNow® Store. For more details, see Activate the NLU Workbench .

Browser requirements

For optimal performance on the Now Platform, use the NLU Workbench in the Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox, or Microsoft Edge browsers. The NLU Workbench isn't supported in Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Related ServiceNow applications and features

Virtual Agent
Virtual Agent administrators can configure a Virtual Agent Designer conversation flow to consume NLU models so that agent chat bots can better understand user statements in conversations.
AI Search
AI Search uses Natural Language Understanding to support multilingual NLU models.
Predictive Intelligence
The NLU Service is included in the Predictive Intelligence plugin.
NLU Service updates
Refer to the NLU Service updates documentation so that you’re up to date with changes to the NLU Service.