NLAST: A natural language assistant for students

This paper presents a system that works as an assistant for students in their learning process. The assistant system has two main parts: an Android application and a server platform. The Android application is a chatterbot (i.e., an agent intended to conduct a conversation in natural language with a human being) based on AIML, one of the more successful languages for developing conversational agents. The chatterbot acts as an intermediation agent between a student and the server platform. The server platform contains four repositories and a recommender (which are part of a bigger professor assessment system). The final objective of the assistant system is to make a student able to carry out several actions related to his/her learning and assessment processes, such as: to consult exam questions from a repository, to receive recommendations about learning material, to ask questions about a course, and to check his/her own assessed exams. These actions are carried out through and Android application using a natural language interface (by voice or typing). The purpose of this development is to facilitate the access to this information through a friendly interface.