Developing a rule based chatbot to aid DLSU counselors in student study habit assessment

• Main Author: Curugan, Edward Rainier C.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2022
• Subjects: Online chat groups; Counselors > De La Salle University (Philippines); Computer Sciences
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etdm_infotech/7; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=etdm_infotech
• Institution: De La Salle University

Ever since the start of the pandemic, face to face interaction has been difficult. This has affected multiple aspects of life in regard to face-to-face consultations. The pandemic has conditioned citizens of cities to conduct everything online specially meetings. One of the face-to-face consultations affected is Counseling. The current office in the university is the Office of Counseling and Career Services (OCCS for short) is in charge of handling the Counseling of students both undergraduate and graduate students. This is in what motivated the creation of this study, as there needed to be a tool that can help both OCCS and students in counseling online. Chatbots are programs developed to simulate a conversation with a user to help a user achieve his/her end goal. It lessens the workload on people and is a useful tool for clients to interact with for the business due to the lessened face to face interaction. Rule-based chatbots are chatbots that follow designed rules instead of the use of AI to help clients in their queries. This study aims to create a rule-based chatbot based on the OCCS counseling model, to see if it is a viable tool to help counselors in student study habit assessments. Creation of the ruleset for the of the chatbot was achieved with coordination of OCCS, and the chatbot itself was developed through Python. The chatbot was then tested on OCCS Counselors and undergraduate students respectively with TAM. This paper contributes to further research regarding technology used in counseling as well as the use of rule-based chatbots in general.