An Automatic Dialog System for Student Advising
Brian McMahan · Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University Mankato · 2014
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. A student advisor was interviewed and recorded during a mock advising session in order to model the interaction between students and their advisors. The phrases and advising information have been encoded using Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) and the dialog system has been implemented in the programming language Python. 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.