Intelligent Conversational Bot for Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs)
  Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) which were introduced in 2008 has since
drawn attention around the world for both its advantages as well as criticism
on its drawbacks. One of the issues in MOOCs which is the lack of interactivity
with the instructor has brought conversational bot into the picture to fill in
this gap. In this study, a prototype of MOOCs conversational bot, MOOC-bot is
being developed and integrated into MOOCs website to respond to the learner
inquiries using text or speech input. MOOC-bot is using the popular Artificial
Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) to develop its knowledge base, leverage
from AIML capability to deliver appropriate responses and can be quickly
adapted to new knowledge domains. The system architecture of MOOC-bot consists
of knowledge base along with AIML interpreter, chat interface, MOOCs website
and Web Speech API to provide speech recognition and speech synthesis
capability. The initial MOOC-bot prototype has the general knowledge from the
past Loebner Prize winner - ALICE, frequent asked questions, and a content
offered by Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka (UTeM). The evaluation of
MOOC-bot based on the past competition questions from Chatterbox Challenge
(CBC) and Loebner Prize has shown that it was able to provide correct answers
most of the time during the test and demonstrated the capability to prolong the
conversation. The advantages of MOOC-bot such as able to provide 24-hour
service that can serve different time zones, able to have knowledge in multiple
domains, and can be shared by multiple sites simultaneously have outweighed its
existing limitations.
