An Automatic Dialog System for Student Advising

Presenter Information

Brian McMahan, Minnesota State University, MankatoFollow

Location

CSU 284A

Start Date

6-4-2010 10:00 AM

End Date

6-4-2010 12:00 PM

Student's Major

Computer Information Science

Student's College

Science, Engineering and Technology

Mentor's Name

Rebecca Bates

Mentor's Department

Integrated Engineering

Mentor's College

Science, Engineering and Technology

Description

Automatic dialog systems are an implementation of natural language processing theory with the goal of allowing the use of natural sentences to communicate with a computer system. The general purpose of this project was to design and implement an automatic dialog system for augmenting university student advising. Student advising is a relatively narrow domain of possible questions and responses. The automatic dialog system focused on prescriptive advising rather than developmental advising to further narrow the domain to scheduling and registration matters. Student advisors were interviewed and recorded during mock advising sessions in order to best model the interaction between students and their advisors. The phrases and advising information have been encoded using AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) and the dialog system has been implemented in the programming language Python. To test it for quality, the system was used by students and advisors. Future work includes expanding the database to include information directly from the Minnesota State University, Mankato student registration system as well as to implement a spoken language interface.