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An intelligent discussion-bot for answering student queries in threaded discussions

Published: 29 January 2006 Publication History

Abstract

This paper describes a discussion-bot that provides answers to students' discussion board questions in an unobtrusive and human-like way. Using information retrieval and natural language processing techniques, the discussion-bot identifies the questioner's interest, mines suitable answers from an annotated corpus of 1236 archived threaded discussions and 279 course documents and chooses an appropriate response. A novel modeling approach was designed for the analysis of archived threaded discussions to facilitate answer extraction. We compare a self-out and an all-in evaluation of the mined answers. The results show that the discussion-bot can begin to meet students' learning requests. We discuss directions that might be taken to increase the effectiveness of the question matching and answer extraction algorithms. The research takes place in the context of an undergraduate computer science course.

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cover image ACM Conferences
IUI '06: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces
January 2006
392 pages
ISBN:1595932879
DOI:10.1145/1111449
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 29 January 2006

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Author Tags

  1. discussion-bot
  2. natural language processing
  3. online learning environment
  4. threaded discussion

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IUI06
IUI06: 11th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces
January 29 - February 1, 2006
Sydney, Australia

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Overall Acceptance Rate 746 of 2,811 submissions, 27%

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  • (2023)SME-in-the-loop: Interaction Preferences when Supervising Bots in Human-AI CommunitiesProceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3563657.3596100(2281-2303)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2023
  • (2023)CoArgue : Fostering Lurkers’ Contribution to Collective Arguments in Community-based QA PlatformsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580932(1-17)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2023)The implementation of chatbot-mediated immediacy for synchronous communication in an online chemistry courseEducation and Information Technologies10.1007/s10639-023-11602-128:8(10665-10690)Online publication date: 3-Feb-2023
  • (2023)Decomposed Prompting to Answer Questions on a Course Discussion BoardArtificial Intelligence in Education. Posters and Late Breaking Results, Workshops and Tutorials, Industry and Innovation Tracks, Practitioners, Doctoral Consortium and Blue Sky10.1007/978-3-031-36336-8_33(218-223)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2023
  • (2022)Automatic Evaluation of Discussion Quality Using Topic Relevance and Participants' Performance2022 International Conference on Technologies and Applications of Artificial Intelligence (TAAI)10.1109/TAAI57707.2022.00023(78-82)Online publication date: Dec-2022
  • (2022)Multi-view Knowledge Graph for Explainable Course Content Recommendation in Course Discussion Posts2022 26th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR)10.1109/ICPR56361.2022.9956098(2785-2791)Online publication date: 21-Aug-2022
  • (2022)Interacting with educational chatbots: A systematic reviewEducation and Information Technologies10.1007/s10639-022-11177-328:1(973-1018)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2022
  • (2022)Artificial intelligence and clinical anatomical education: Promises and perilsAnatomical Sciences Education10.1002/ase.222117:2(249-262)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2022
  • (2021)Conversational agents in MOOCs: reflections on first outcomes of the colMOOC projectIntelligent Systems and Learning Data Analytics in Online Education10.1016/B978-0-12-823410-5.00001-2(xxxvii-lxxiv)Online publication date: 2021
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