Glossary

Below are the main concepts used in NeMo Guardrails:

• LLM-based Application: a software application that uses an LLM to drive

• Bot: synonym for LLM-based application.

• Utterance: the raw text coming from the user or the bot.

• Intent: the canonical form (i.e. structured representation) of a user/bot utterance.

• Event: something that has happened and is relevant to the conversation e.g. user is silent, user clicked something, user made a gesture, etc.

• Action: a custom code that the bot can invoke; usually for connecting to third-party API.

• Context: any data relevant to the conversation (i.e. a key-value dictionary).

• Flow: a sequence of messages and events, potentially with additional branching logic.

• Rails: specific ways of controlling the behavior of a conversational system (a.k.a. bot) e.g. not talk about politics, respond in a specific way to certain user requests, follow a predefined dialog path, use a specific language style, extract data etc.

Recommended naming conventions

User messages:

• the first word should be a verb; “ask”, “respond”, “inform”, “provide”, “express”, “comment”, “confirm”, “deny”, “request”

• the rest of the words should be nouns

• should read naturally (e.g. not user credit card problem vs. user inform credit card problem)