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

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.