Cognitive Virtual Admissions Counselor

Authors

Kumar Raja Guvindan Raju, Southern Methodist UniversityFollow
Cory Adams, Southern Methodist UniversityFollow
Raghuram Srinivas, Southern Methodist UniversityFollow

Abstract

Abstract. In this paper, we present a cognitive virtual admissions counselor for the Master of Science in Data Science program at Southern Methodist University. The virtual admissions counselor is a system capable of providing potential students accurate information at the time that they want to know it. After the evaluation of multiple technologies, Amazon’s LEX was selected to serve as the core technology for the virtual counselor chatbot. Student surveys were leveraged to collect and generate training data to deploy the natural language capability. The cognitive virtual admissions counselor platform is currently capable of providing an end-to-end conversational dialog to resolve three categories of questions, referred to as intents. These intents allow the chatbot to determine if the user is asking questions about class sizes, tuition amount, and semester start dates. The virtual admissions counselor is able to support three intents, each with accuracy metrics greater than 90%. The virtual admissions counselor is also capable of providing a conversational dialog allowing the successful resolution of potential student inquiries using LEX as the core service.

Recommended Citation

Guvindan Raju, Kumar Raja; Adams, Cory; and Srinivas, Raghuram (2018) "Cognitive Virtual Admissions Counselor," SMU Data Science Review: Vol. 1: No. 1, Article 6.
Available at: https://scholar.smu.edu/datasciencereview/vol1/iss1/6

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License