A serverless academic adviser chatbot

Abstract

Academic advising plays a vital role in students' academic success; however, it is time consuming and difficult to maintain. Moreover, due to the COVID-19 outbreak and the sudden shift of education to the cyberspace, it has become even more challenging and time consuming for advisors to handle the drastically increasing numbers of queries received through online communication channels. To advise an enormous number of newly admitted students, the need arises for solutions that can handle the demands of a large number of students effectively without affecting student's academic success. This paper proposes an efficient, fast, scalable, and cost-effective solution using a serverless chatbot. The proposed Academic Advising chatbot, which can be integrated with Microsoft Teams, implements advanced semantic analysis techniques from Natural Language Processing (NLP) and analyzes the context of the student's queries, and responds accordingly. © 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.

Keywords Academic advising, Chatbot, COVID-19, Natural Language Processing, Serverless computing