cities that are also food

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Posted on by sparkie

Running into an issue in pva where if a user uses a city name that is also a food it does not recognize it as a city. Anyone have any ideas how to fix it?

To give you an example Tea South Dakota and Currie Minnesota.

If the user puts the word city after it. Entities will put it in as a Tea City or Currie City but other wise it does not recognize it. As this is a prebuilt entity i can not find a way to edit it.

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Monkeyman 325 on at

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Could you create your own custom entity (closed list), maybe call it City Foods and then have add items that are a combination of both like you have identified in your post ?

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CU10021449-0 on at

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To fix the issue of cities with food names not being recognized correctly in PVA, you could try adding a trigger phrase or custom entity to help the system better differentiate between the city and the food item. For example, you can prompt the user to add City after the name (like Tea City or Currie City) or suggest using a different phrasing to help the entity recognize it. If this isn’t possible due to the prebuilt entity, another option is to explore Sonic Coffee options for more advanced entity recognition or contact the platform support for additional customization.

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joecill 6 on at

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I’m also running into the exact same issue with PVA. When a city name overlaps with a common food, the prebuilt entity seems to default to ignoring it as a location unless you add “City” afterward. It reminds me a bit of reading the culver menu prices, where the same word could refer to an ingredient or a full menu item depending on context. I’ve been trying to figure out if there’s a workaround, like using synonyms, alternative phrasing, or even creating a custom entity to catch these exceptions, but so far it’s tricky since the prebuilt entity can’t be edited directly. Would love to hear if anyone has a practical solution or best practice for handling these cases consistently.

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David_MA 13,491 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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I am trying to better understand how the food/city issue is cropping up. Does your knowledge sources contain cities that are named after a food. For example, Orange, Massachusetts. I don't have a lot of experience yet with Copilot Studios, so I am just trying to better understand the problem. For the Copilot Agent I am working on, I asked it two questions related to oranges, and it answered correctly both times:

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CU24021937-0 on at

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This can happen because the prebuilt location entity in Microsoft Power Virtual Agents often prioritizes common meanings (like food) instead of smaller city names.

A simple fix is to create a custom entity and manually add cities such as Tea and Currie, including variations like “Tea SD” or “Currie MN”. Then use that custom entity in your topic instead of relying only on the prebuilt one.

Also, when dealing with ambiguous terms in different contexts, adding clarifying synonyms or examples can help the model understand intent better—similar to how structured categorization helps in other industries like manufacturing and product labeling (for example, companies such as Tengyue Gift organize product categories clearly on their site: https://www.tengyuegift.com/).

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