Designing a Chat-bot for College Information using Information Retrieval and Automatic Text Summarization Techniques

Abstract

Background:: In the era of information overload it is very difficult for a human reader to make sense of the vast information available on the internet quickly. Even for a specific domain like a college or university website, it may be difficult for a user to browse through all the links to quickly get the relevant answers. Objective:: In this scenario, the design of a chat-bot which can answer questions related to college information and compare between colleges will be very useful and novel. Methods:: In this paper, a novel conversational interface chat-bot application with information retrieval and text summarization skill is designed and implemented. Firstly, this chat-bot has a simple dialog skill; when it can understand the user query intent, it responds from the stored collection of answers. Secondly, for unknown queries, this chat-bot can search the internet, and then perform text summarization using advanced techniques of natural language processing (NLP) and text mining (TM). Results:: The advancement of NLP capability of information retrieval and text summarization using machine learning techniques of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI), Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), Word2Vec, Global Vector (GloVe) and TextRank is reviewed and compared in this paper first before implementing them for the chat-bot design. This chat-bot improves user experience tremendously by getting answers to specific queries concisely which takes less time than to read the entire document. Students, parents and faculty can get the answers for a variety of information like admission criteria, fees, course offerings, notice board, attendance, grades, placements, faculty profile, research papers, patents, etc. more efficiently. Conclusion:: The purpose of this paper was to follow the advancement in NLP technologies and implement them in a novel application.