Deprecations and Removals
=========================
- [\4964](https://github.com/rasahq/rasa/issues/4964): The endpoint `/conversations/<conversation_id>/execute` is now deprecated. Instead, users should use
the `/conversations/<conversation_id>/trigger_intent` endpoint and thus trigger intents instead of actions.
- [\4978](https://github.com/rasahq/rasa/issues/4978): Remove option `use_cls_token` from tokenizers and option `return_sequence` from featurizers.
By default all tokenizer add a special token (`__CLS__`) to the end of the list of tokens.
This token will be used to capture the features of the whole utterance.
The featurizers will return a matrix of size (number-of-tokens x feature-dimension) by default.
This allows to train sequence models.
However, the feature vector of the `__CLS__` token can be used to train non-sequence models.
The corresponding classifier can decide what kind of features to use.
Features
========
- [\400](https://github.com/rasahq/rasa/issues/400): Rename `templates` key in domain to `responses`.
`templates` key will still work for backwards compatibility but will raise a future warning.
- [\4902](https://github.com/rasahq/rasa/issues/4902): Added a new configuration parameter, `ranking_length` to the `EmbeddingPolicy`, `EmbeddingIntentClassifier`,
and `ResponseSelector` classes.
- [\4964](https://github.com/rasahq/rasa/issues/4964): External events and reminders now trigger intents (and entities) instead of actions.
Add new endpoint `/conversations/<conversation_id>/trigger_intent`, which lets the user specify an intent and a
list of entities that is injected into the conversation in place of a user message. The bot then predicts and
executes a response action.
- [\4978](https://github.com/rasahq/rasa/issues/4978): Add `ConveRTTokenizer`.
The tokenizer should be used whenever the `ConveRTFeaturizer` is used.
Every tokenizer now supports the following configuration options:
`intent_tokenization_flag`: Flag to check whether to split intents (default `False`).
`intent_split_symbol`: Symbol on which intent should be split (default `_`)
Improvements
============
- [\1988](https://github.com/rasahq/rasa/issues/1988): Remove the need of specifying utter actions in the `actions` section explicitly if these actions are already
listed in the `templates` section.
- [\4877](https://github.com/rasahq/rasa/issues/4877): Entity examples that have been extracted using an external extractor are excluded
from Markdown dumping in `MarkdownWriter.dumps()`. The excluded external extractors
are `DucklingHTTPExtractor` and `SpacyEntityExtractor`.
- [\4902](https://github.com/rasahq/rasa/issues/4902): The `EmbeddingPolicy`, `EmbeddingIntentClassifier`, and `ResponseSelector` now by default normalize confidence
levels over the top 10 results. See `migration-to-rasa-1.7`{.interpreted-text role="ref"} for more details.
- [\4964](https://github.com/rasahq/rasa/issues/4964): `ReminderCancelled` can now cancel multiple reminders if no name is given. It still cancels a single
reminder if the reminder\'s name is specified.
Bugfixes
========
- [\4774](https://github.com/rasahq/rasa/issues/4774): Requests to `/model/train` do not longer block other requests to the Rasa server.
- [\4896](https://github.com/rasahq/rasa/issues/4896): Fixed default behavior of `rasa test core --evaluate-model-directory` when called without `--model`. Previously, the latest model file was used as `--model`. Now the default model directory is used instead.
New behavior of `rasa test core --evaluate-model-directory` when given an existing file as argument for `--model`: Previously, this led to an error. Now a warning is displayed and the directory containing the given file is used as `--model`.
- [\5040](https://github.com/rasahq/rasa/issues/5040): Updated the dependency `networkx` from 2.3.0 to 2.4.0. The old version created incompatibilities when using pip.
There is an imcompatibility between Rasa dependecy requests 2.22.0 and the own depedency from Rasa for networkx raising errors upon pip install. There is also a bug corrected in `requirements.txt` which used `~=` instead of `==`. All of these are fixed using networkx 2.4.0.
- [\5057](https://github.com/rasahq/rasa/issues/5057): Fixed compatibility issue with Microsoft Bot Framework Emulator if `service_url` lacked a trailing `/`.
- [\5092](https://github.com/rasahq/rasa/issues/5092): DynamoDB tracker store decimal values will now be rounded on save. Previously values exceeding 38 digits caused an unhandled error.
Miscellaneous internal changes
==============================
- \4458, \4664, \4780, \5029