Chatbot for admissions

The communication of potential students with a university department is performed manually and it is a very time consuming procedure. The opportunity to communicate with on a one-to-one basis is highly valued. However with many hundreds of applications each year, one-to-one conversations are not feasible in most cases. The communication will require a member of academic staff to expend several hours to find suitable answers and contact each student. It would be useful to reduce his costs and time. The project aims to reduce the burden on the head of admissions, and potentially other users, by developing a convincing chatbot. A suitable algorithm must be devised to search through the set of data and find a potential answer. The program then replies to the user and provides a relevant web link if the user is not satisfied by the answer. Furthermore a web interface is provided for both users and an administrator. The achievements of the project can be summarised as follows. To prepare the background of the project a literature review was undertaken, together with an investigation of existing tools, and consultation with the head of admissions. The requirements of the system were established and a range of algorithms and tools were investigated, including keyword and template matching. An algorithm that combines keyword matching with string similarity has been developed. A usable system using the proposed algorithm has been implemented. The system was evaluated by keeping logs of questions and answers and by feedback received by potential students that used it. 3 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr Peter Hancox for his immeasurable help and support throughout this project. I also need to express my thanks to the computer support team for their excellent help and instructions. Finally, I feel the need to acknowledge the constant support offered by my parents. Introduction This chapter covers an introduction to the project including the context, a description of aims and objectives, a description of what has been achieved, contributions and the structure of the report. Although the admissions process works properly as it is, it is very difficult and time consuming to contact a member of staff of the university. However, the problem would be partially solved if the applicant could talk to a convincing chatbot, able to respond to their concerns with information about admissions, booking accommodation, paying fees in instalments and what pre-sessional courses are on offer. The …