Choice question

A choice question is Laya's single-label classification primitive, and one of the three question types of the Jev-style /v1/systemone protocol. You give it instructions and a set of options; it returns exactly one of them.

Shape

criteria can be a dict of label to description, or a plain list of labels (normalised to a dict with no descriptions):

"intent": {
  "type": "choice",
  "instructions": "What does the customer want in `message`?",
  "criteria": {
    "refund": "money returned or a duplicate charge reversed",
    "technical_help": "a bug, outage or integration problem",
    "other": "none of the other options fits"
  }
}

The answer contains choice (the argmax label), probabilities (one entry per label, summing to 1), confidence (normalised-entropy confidence, 0 to 1) and an action block.

Designing good choice questions

• Make options mutually exclusive and include an explicit other. The softmax must put its mass somewhere.
• Write short, distinctive descriptions. Options share the head_max_len budget (192 tokens English, 256 multilingual) and each is capped at 48 tokens.
• Keep the label count moderate. Laya is strong at small label sets (AG News, 4 labels: 0.950) and weak at large ones at default settings (Banking77, 77 labels: 0.425). For 20+ options, use a two-step coarse-to-fine choice.
• Use a descriptive key rather than a letter unless you are working around noul bias, in which case neutral keys like A/B help.

If more than one label can apply, ask several noul questions instead. See choice, score and noul and the intent detection use case.