Intelligent Agents in Educational Institutions: AEdBOT– A Chatbot for Administrative Assistance using Deep Learning Hybrid Model Approach

Abstract Chatbots substantially improve administrative support for educational institu- tions facing immense pressure during admissions. Chatbots not only automate repetitive tasks, handle large volumes of inquiries, collecting data from inter- actions but also provide an additional way for students to access information. Existing chatbots are built on traditional Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches where the accuracy required for seamless real-time interactions is usually compro- mised. This article presents novel AEdBOT - an AI-based Educational ChatBOT system where a novel Deep Learning (DL)-based Hybrid model approach is proposed grounded on integrating informational retrieval and generative neural networks. Moreover, a novel Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipeline is developed on top of the open-source Rasa platform to aid with BERT (Bidi- rectional Encoder Representation Transformer) for dense feature extraction and DIET (Dual Intent and Entity Transformer) Classifier for intent classification and entity extraction from the natural language text. Furthermore, the customized dual fallback classifier algorithm is developed to provide the self-learning ability to a chatbot on out-of-scope inputs and acts as a recommendation system. The effec- tiveness of the proposed chatbot is established through two real-life datasets from educational institutes. For the first dataset, AEdBOT achieved 94.7%, 96.0%, 96.0%, and 95.1% precision, accuracy, recall, and F1-Score, respectively at an average mean response time of 216.43ms per query and a user-friendliness score of 77.5 on the System Usability Scale (SUS). The second dataset is used from the literature for comparative analysis, and AEdBOT attained 76.2%, 83.7%, 77.7%, and 79.1% accuracy, precision, F1-Score, and recall, respectively. Experiment results reveal that AEdBOT significantly improves response accuracy and outperforms state-of-the-art educational chatbots.