Potentials of Chatbot Technologies for Higher Education: A Systematic Review

Chatbots are used in different areas such as customer service, healthcare and education. The potential for improving outcomes and processes in education is high but differs for different types of chatbots. As universities want to provide excellent teaching, it is important to find the chatbot technologies with the greatest possible benefit. This paper presents a systematic review of chatbot technologies in five application areas. For each application area, the ten most cited publications are analysed and a possible categorisation scheme for chatbot technologies is derived. Furthermore, it is investigated which chatbot technology types are used and their suitability for higher education is analysed. The results show that chatbots can be categorised using five categories derived from the 50 publications. A total of 14 different types of chatbot technologies are found in the five areas. Nine of them are suitable for use in higher education

First insights on a passive major depressive disorder prediction system with incorporated conversational chatbot

Almost 50% of cases of major depressive disorder go undiagnosed. In this paper, we propose a passive diagnostic system that combines the areas of clinical psychology, machine learning and conversational dialogue systems. We have trained a dialogue system, powered by sequence-to-sequence neural networks that can have a real-time conversation with individuals. In tandem, we have developed specific machine learning classifiers that monitor the conversation and predict the presence or absence of certain crucial depression symptoms. This would facilitate real-time instant crisis support for those suffering from depression. Our evaluation metrics have suggested this could be a positive future direction of research in both developing more human like chatbots and identifying depression in written text. We hope this work may additionally have practical implications in the area of crisis support services for mental health organisations.This publication has emanated from research conducted with the financial support of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) under Grant Number SFI/12/RC/2289 (Insight).peer-reviewe