An Academic Chatbot Using NLP and Deep Learning

Abstract

In light of rapid technological developments, the university administrations are seeking to adopt new and sophisticated means to improve the student experience and facilitate administrative processes. One of these means is to use chatbots as an assistant to university students and employees. Chatbots allow immediate responses to student inquiries and provide technical and administrative support in full-time, which reduces costs and improves the student experience. Based on artificial intelligence technologies and natural language processing techniques, we have developed our own chatbot called UnivBot that permits to answer to a large range of students’ questions and reduces the large volume of work ensured by the dministrative staff so that they can devote themselves to other tasks. Among the characteristics of UnivBot that it is able to be improved constantly and quickly by updating the its knowledge base, and training language models and deep learning techniques to provide answers in real-time and with a high accuracy.