Disambiguation

This page describes the Disambiguation capability.

Misunderstandings can occur in any conversation, but when they occur in Crystal, rest assured that they don't go unnoticed.

A Proactive Request to Solve Ambiguities

Misunderstandings in conversation can happen because of the occurrence of ambiguities, i.e. words or concepts that may take on different meanings at the same time.

If your Project contains Entities, Filters, Objectives, or even whole Topics which are too similar among them, Crystal will automatically detect those ambiguities when arising in a question.

In this cases, Crystal needs more information to understand which concept to select and is able to proactively provide you with a list of options to choose from in order to clarify the question.

By selecting the correct option, you will provide Crystal with the missing information to disambiguate, i.e. resolve the ambiguity.

Now your question has been clarified!

Disambiguation Options

Please Note

As disambiguation involves a choice among Topics, it may happen at any point in conversation where you are specifying a Topic: i.e. both if you are directly asking for a Topic and if you are trying to activate some other capability on a Topic (such as in requests of anomaly detection, threshold monitoring, or forecasting).

Ambiguity Types

There are different types of ambiguities that can arise, depending on the nature and granularity of the information involved.

The possible scenarios are the following:

• Ambiguous Entities

• Ambiguous Aggregations of Entities

• Ambiguous Values of Filters

• Ambiguous Time Aggregators

Please Note

A question might contain more than one ambiguity and of different types.

Let’s see them in detail.

Ambiguous Entities

This ambiguity happens when the combination of the Entities in the question leads to multiple possible Topics.

The Topics in the list can match with the Entities either fully or partially.

Full Match

Topics fully match if they contain all the requested Entities.

This ambiguity arises when you ask for a very common Entity that might be present in many Topics.

In this case, Crystal tries to disambiguate based on the granularity of the Custom Entities.

• Question: "Show me the breakdown of sales”

• Ambiguity: “sales”

• Candidate Topics:

  • "sales by region" (Custom Entity)

  • "sales by category" (Custom Entity)

Full Match Entity Ambiguity

Partial Match

Topics partially match if they contain only some of the requested Entities.

This ambiguity arises when you ask for an Entity that is not present in any Topic.

In this case, Crystal tries to disambiguate by retrieving those Topics that include the Entity somehow.

• Question: "Bring me up the count of sales”

• Ambiguity: “count of sales”

• Candidate Topics (the Topic "count of sales" does not exist):

  • "total of net sales volume actual"

  • "total of net sales value actual"

Partial Match Entity Ambiguity

Ambiguous Aggregations of Entities

This ambiguity happens when there are multiple Topics containing the same Entity differing only in the aggregation function (sum, count, total, etc.).

In this case, Crystal returns the list of actually available Custom Entities.

• Question: "Show me the cost”

• Ambiguity: “cost”

• Candidate Topics:

  • "total of cost"

  • "average cost"

Aggregation Ambiguity

Ambiguous Values of Filters

This ambiguity happens when the question contains a Filter Value that does not exist but partially matches other values.

In this case, Crystal returns the actually available values for that Filter.

• Question: “Show me the total sales in America”

• Ambiguity: “America”

• Candidate Filter Values:

  • "North America"

  • "South America"

Please Note

In this disambiguation scenario, in contrast to all the other ones, it is possible for you to select more than one Filter Value at once, if needed.

Partially Matching Filter Values Ambiguity

Single Value Selection

Multiple Values Selection

Ambiguous Time Aggregators

This ambiguity happens when there are multiple Overtime Topics differing only in the time aggregator.

• Question: "What's the tax overtime?”

• Ambiguity: “time aggregator”

• Candidate Topics:

  • "tax over time (by day)"

  • "tax over time (by semester)"

  • "tax over time (by quarter)"

Time Aggregator Ambiguity

Ambiguous Source Tables

In the context of Entity-Based Conversation, it may happen that Entities with the same name get detected.

In this case, Crystal will ask you to choose the correct source table for the Entity.

Keep talking to your data!

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