Abstract
This project is focusing on creating a chatbot to be used by students to get their queries responded easily from the college website. The College Enquiry Chatbot has the capacity to make friendly conversations; respond the course and faculty details; give the link for the academic calendar; answer the frequently asked questions; calculate the fees based on the student's input; and give the timings, address, contacts, and events information of the departments like Union, Library, IPGE, and AIRC. To build the chatbot, Microsoft Azure bot service as well as Microsoft cognitive services, namely, Text Analytics, LUIS, and QnA Maker are used. Most of the existing chatbots lack empathy and fail to accommodate anything outside of the script. In order to address these problems, the College Enquiry Chatbot extends the implementation of the current chatbots by adding sentiment analysis and active learning. Although, sentimental analysis correctly recognizes the user's query as positive, negative and neutral, the system was partially successful in adding empathy to the chatbot. It is because the system requires more rigorous training data to handle all queries which are off-script. However, for such queries, active learning helps to improve the chatbot performance since it correctly understands the user's questions, asks clarifying question, and then retrains the system to give the response what the user intends to get. The future work include training the chatbot with more varied data; increasing the scope of the chatbot by adding a speech recognition feature so that users can speak to get responses; and including integration with multiple channels such as phone call, SMS, and various social media platforms.