An Intelligent Discussion-Bot for Answering Student Queries in Threaded Discussions (2006)
| Venue: | In Proceedings of Intelligent User Interface (IUI-2006 |
| Citations: | 23 - 10 self |
BibTeX
@INPROCEEDINGS{Feng06anintelligent,
author = {Donghui Feng and Erin Shaw and Jihie Kim and Eduard Hovy},
title = {An Intelligent Discussion-Bot for Answering Student Queries in Threaded Discussions},
booktitle = {In Proceedings of Intelligent User Interface (IUI-2006},
year = {2006},
pages = {171--177}
}
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Abstract
This paper describes a discussion-bot, which 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 generates a human-like reply. 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.
