A Campus-based Chatbot System using Natural Language Processing and Neural Network

Abstract

A chatbot is designed to simulate human conversation and provide instant responses to users. Chatbots have gained popularity in providing automated customer support and information retrieval among organisations. Besides, it also acts as a virtual assistant to communicate with users by delivering updated answers based on users' input. Most chatbots still use the traditional rule-based chatbot, which can only respond to pre-defined sentences, making the users unlikely to use the chatbot. This paper aims to design and build a campus chatbot for the Faculty of Information Science & Technology (FIST) of Multimedia University that facilitates the study life of FIST students. Before the FIST chatbot can be used, natural language processing techniques such as tokenisation, lemmatisation and bag of word model are used to generate the input that can be used to train the neural network model (multilayer perceptron model). It makes the FIST chatbot comprehends user intent by analysing their questions, enabling it to address a broader range of inquiries and cater to the student's need with accurate answers or information related to the Faculty of Information Science & Technology. Besides, we also developed the backend interface allowing the admin to add and edit the dataset in the proposed chatbot and enable it continuously responds to the student with the latest and updated information.