An Enhanced Student Enquiry Chatbot Incorporation in a University-Based System

Abstract

University students especially the new ones experienced some problems on getting admission repeatedly over the years and the answers to these problems are provided by the institutional staff concerned. Since the number of students are increasing drastically and also some of these problems are asked several times to the staff, there is a need to developed a system that would be able to answer some of these questions in a conversational mode and provide answers when the need arise. The system can serve as University Enquiry Chatbot which can typically assist in providing information and other institutional academic activities to the new and existing students. It will also allow the students to benefit from relevant information about the institution activities such as tuition fees, course registration, admission status, hostel application, result check and so on and so forth. In this paper, an enquiry chatbot application is proposed and integrated in the prototype University web site to provide students of the institution with a simple way of talking to the staff via queries using conversational text with responses provided in a format such as text and pictures. This makes it possible for the system to provide answers related to the student query in a simpler and efficient manner. The result of the experimental evaluation conducted indicated that, the proposed system demonstrated that, most of the selected students of the university assessed the system roles as satisfactory based on the study results obtained.