Transforming mentorship: an AI-powered chatbot approach to university guidance

Abstract

Chatbots are agents designed for communicating with humans and mimic the human- human interaction style. They can understand natural language and communicate with users through it. In this complicated digital world, university students face enormous challenges throughout their undergraduate journey. Universities cannot appoint that many mentors to attend to every student’s query. Even though there are a notable number of digital tools and platforms to support students, there re- mains a gap in personalized guidance for newcomers, specifically in the form of chatbots. A digital mentor to meet the specific demands and difficulties faced by new students is what will help them handle academic obstacles more effectively. Filling this crucial gap is essential for the creation of supportive and inclusive ed ucational technologies. Our research aims to design and develop a corpus-based chatbot that will primarily serve as a mentor to students. The interactive chatbot will be able to communicate with the user through informal dialogue generated by natural language processing. Finally, it will conclude by finding and assessing any biases that the chatbot may exhibit. This chatbot can assist first-year students by answering their questions. It can also help students obtain a sense of the topics of a course and plan an elective class routine for their semesters. Thus, it will assist students during their academic life of open-credit universities.