Pineapple Chatbot

Pineapple chatbot is a chatbot dedicated to providing general information which can be found throughout the www.calstatela.com domain.

How does it work?

The idea is pretty simple. We take a user's question and present the text to a machine learning library named spaCy, which is capable of interpreting the question's entity for the question: What is Dr. Zilong's email?

SpaCy can detect that Dr. Zilong is a entity of type PERSON. Then we find the user's intent, which in this case is to get an email. Using a simple statistical model, we score a variety of links using the information extracted and pull an email from our system and output the answer to the user.

However, there are also times where a clear entity is not given. For example in the question: How do I apply for financial aid?

For situations like these, we lean over to another statistical model called the Bayesian model. By first removing common words like I, do, and for, we are left with the question's keywords. This information is then compared across a number of categories of pages (i.e. pages about financial aid are categorized as financial aid, pages about computer science are categorized as computer science and so on..). The determined category is then given a boost in accuracy when it is passed on to our other statistical model for scoring. Since questions within this realm can get quite large, we give the user a link to the page where an answer to their question can most likely be found.

For more information about our chatbot, please visit our GitHub link below.

Group Member Information:

• Enrique Castillo-Rosales
• Juilo Agular
• Yi Ruan
• Kuong Thong
• Jose Lopez 

Group Advisor:

• Professor Zilong Ye

Liaison

• ITS Chairman: Kee Chang