CSM: A Chatbot Solution to Manage Student Questions About Payments and Enrollment in University

Abstract

Students at the University of Guayaquil who are pursuing a degree in Software Engineering and who have difficulty obtaining information about enrollment and tuition payments are the target audience of the application developed in this study. For this purpose, a chatbot is proposed. It uses machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to answer students’ questions. To evaluate the usability of the system from a quantitative point of view, the time taken by six students to complete user registration (T1), perform five searches (T2), and unsubscribe (T3) was measured in minutes, with an average duration of three minutes for each activity. To assess students’ perceptions of the use of the proposed chatbot, a sample of sixty students who had previously interacted with the proposed solution were surveyed. Aspects evaluated included: Ease of use of the system (A), Speed (B), Appropriate behavior (C), Confidence to use it again (D), and Quality of the answer provided (E). Each of the evaluated features (A-E) was rated above 3 out of 5 in most cases. Thus, the chatbot solution is well accepted by the students, even considering its use in future academic semesters.

Keywords

• Chatbot
• cloud server
• natural language processing
• neural network
• machine learning