ASU Improves Its Artificial Intelligence to Help Prospective Students

The bot assistant of the Admissions Office of Astrakhan State University is already familiar to many applicants. It has been answering them frequently asked questions for the second year, and since its first launch, it has significantly increased the pool of answers. Philology students are helping the Artificial Intelligence Project Office to develop the service.

In the process of creating the bot, the collection of data on the questions asked by applicants, and most importantly, the answers needed to be given, was carried out jointly with the staff of the ASU Admissions Office. Based on the information received, engineers trained an algorithm based on natural language processing techniques (NLP as an AI branch).

Aleksandr Koshkarov, Head of the ASU Artificial Intelligence Project Office, said that students of the Faculty of Philology & Journalism, who acted as carriers of the subject and expert knowledge, helped in prototyping the system for the university.

By the way, the chatbot not only helps to find information. As it was recommended by Rector Konstantin Markelov, ASU engineers made it as “alive” as possible, teaching it to conduct an interesting, emotional dialogue with applicants.

Since the beginning of accepting documents this year, the bot has already answered almost one and a half thousand questions.