Xiao-Shih: The Educational Intelligent Question Answering Bot on Chinese-Based MOOCs

Abstract

In this study, the educational intelligent question answering bot named Xiao-Shih has been developed for solving learners' questions as instructors and teaching assistants on MOOCs. Experiments were conducted with Xiao-Shih in a paid course titled "Python for Data Science" on "ShareCourse" which is one of the largest Chinese-based MOOC platform in Taiwan. Over one thousand discussion threads posted in both English and Chinese languages were retrieved to train the bot by natural language processing (NLP) and Random Forest (RF) in machine learning algorithms. This paper presents the implementation details on developing Xiao-Shih. First, we developed an initial version of Xiao-Shih with simply NLP techniques and text similarity approaches. However, Xiao-Shih only obtains 0.413 precision at best with different thresholds of the question similarity. Therefore, features and labels of answering correctness have been collected for the next version of Xiao-Shih. Trained by Random Forest with 70% of the entire dataset, Xiao-Shih obtains 0.833 precision with test dataset. With this educational intelligent question answering bot, learners can solve their problems immediately in seconds rather than wait for humans' response in hours even days. Moreover, Xiao-Shih can also ease instructors' and teaching assistants' burden on answering questions.