Rule-based chabot for student enquiries

Abstract Conversational agents, or chatbots, refer to computer programs that conduct conversations and deliver a natural language interface to its users. Due to the significant foothold messaging applications have begun receiving, chatbots have spawned a new revival and gaining vast popularity. The focus of this paper is to present the implementation of a rule-based enquiry chatbot that is designed exclusively toward students of Asia Pacific University (APU). The implemented chatbot known as ‘APU Admin Bot’ intends to provide students with a quicker solution to resolving their queries instead of heavily depending on the administrative offices. Relying on the rule-based approach of pattern recognition, certain words, phrases and even actions trigger an entire set of responses from the chatbot. Built entirely from the Chatfuel platform and hosted on Facebook Messenger, the implemented chatbot is reliant on a code-less authoring tool and a messaging platform, instead of traditional programming and architectural structures.