A syntactic and semantic multi-agent based question answering system for collaborative e-learning

With the rapid progress in technology and the advancement in learning systems, e-Learning has proved to be one of the best means for learning in many sectors. In an e-Learning environment, and to help learners to benefit the maximum from their courses, tutors are faced with the arduous task of writing answers — containing detailed, useful information — to every query and question they receive daily from their students. The task can take up a considerable amount of the time they spend each day on teaching if the number of students is high and the tutors have a narrow timeframe in which to reply to them all. In this paper, we present a Question Answering System (QAS) that helps learners to find the best answers to their questions and helps tutors to answer questions asked by their students in an e-Learning environment. we present a syntactic and semantic multi-agent approach to question answering in e-learning platforms. We try to improve existing approaches by using multiple techniques in a multi-layer system where learners and tutors with the help of automatic agents collaborate to find the best answer to the submitted question.