A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant • Hacker News Board

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#31

Post by burkaman » Fri, May 13, 2016, 5:13 PM UTC

ikeboy wrote: post #22

burkaman wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not 10,000 questions, 10,000 messages: http://www.news.gatech.edu/2016/05/09/artificial-intelligenc... That article says ~300 students, 30 posts each seems pretty normal.

So the original article: 1. Didn't mention it was an online course 2. Didn't mention there were 300 students 3. Claimed it was questions instead of posts

I don't think 1 and 2 are very important for the story, and the questions/posts thing seems like an honest mistake. No harm done. The meaning is basically the same, since the bot can presumably reply to any post, not just a top level question.

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#32

Post by adekok » Fri, May 13, 2016, 5:14 PM UTC

dimino wrote: post #27

collyw wrote: post #25

Rather than inventing sophisticated chat bots, couldn't he have just had a well organised web page? If the question were where is assignment two / when is assignment due. The examples given seem like a "high tech" (possibly unreliable) solution to a low tech problem.

I could reasonably ride a horse to work every day, it's only 2 miles.

And where would you get said horse? Where would you keep it? What would you feed it? Who would take care of it?

Students should be capable of reading text. If they can't, they belong in kindergarten, not university.

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#33

Post by [deleted] » Fri, May 13, 2016, 5:15 PM UTC

ars wrote: post #19

This is the key: > The system is only allowed to answer questions if it calculates that it is 97 percent or more confident in its answer. Knowing when you don't know the answer is something that has been lacking from AI I've seen. Of course the problem is that not all AI has the option of deferring to a human. Anyone know what percent of questions the AI answered, vs redirected?

[deleted]

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#34

Post by collyw » Fri, May 13, 2016, 5:17 PM UTC

adekok wrote: post #29

collyw wrote: post #25

Rather than inventing sophisticated chat bots, couldn't he have just had a well organised web page? If the question were where is assignment two / when is assignment due. The examples given seem like a "high tech" (possibly unreliable) solution to a low tech problem.

Having written documentation for end users, that will work for only a portion of them. Probably most, which is good. But there are a significant percentage of users who can't (or won't) read documentation. Even they do manage to read it, they don't understand it. For some reason, human interaction works better for those people. They ask a question, and someone copies the answer from the documentation, and pastes it i…

Is the documentation going the be available via a chat bot or a web page? My guess is the second.

Screw the lazy users who won't look up documentation. If you can't read docs (he is a computer science professor), then do you really aren't in the right subject.

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#35

Post by grayclhn » Fri, May 13, 2016, 5:17 PM UTC

collyw wrote: post #25

Rather than inventing sophisticated chat bots, couldn't he have just had a well organised web page? If the question were where is assignment two / when is assignment due. The examples given seem like a "high tech" (possibly unreliable) solution to a low tech problem.

I think you'd be surprised at how often students don't read webpages and fire off an email to the class TA or instructor. Replying with a link to the relevant part of the webpage is something I'd love to automate.

(I teach a largish introductory university class)

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#36

Post by heurist » Fri, May 13, 2016, 5:17 PM UTC

collyw wrote: post #25

Rather than inventing sophisticated chat bots, couldn't he have just had a well organised web page? If the question were where is assignment two / when is assignment due. The examples given seem like a "high tech" (possibly unreliable) solution to a low tech problem.

Or the engineer's solution to a social problem :)

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#37

Post by qb45 » Fri, May 13, 2016, 5:21 PM UTC

grayclhn wrote: post #35

collyw wrote: post #25

Rather than inventing sophisticated chat bots, couldn't he have just had a well organised web page? If the question were where is assignment two / when is assignment due. The examples given seem like a "high tech" (possibly unreliable) solution to a low tech problem.

I think you'd be surprised at how often students don't read webpages and fire off an email to the class TA or instructor. Replying with a link to the relevant part of the webpage is something I'd love to automate. (I teach a largish introductory university class)

You can automate replying with a link to the course webpage ToC. Also, make it absolutely clear that the reply is automatic. Hopefully they'll get the hint.

Or heck, just make it a policy that if they haven't received an answer in a week, this means they need to look at the website. I don't know why some people strive to be so accommodating to laziness nowadays.

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#38

Post by olalonde » Fri, May 13, 2016, 5:23 PM UTC

adekok wrote: post #29

collyw wrote: post #25

Rather than inventing sophisticated chat bots, couldn't he have just had a well organised web page? If the question were where is assignment two / when is assignment due. The examples given seem like a "high tech" (possibly unreliable) solution to a low tech problem.

Having written documentation for end users, that will work for only a portion of them. Probably most, which is good. But there are a significant percentage of users who can't (or won't) read documentation. Even they do manage to read it, they don't understand it. For some reason, human interaction works better for those people. They ask a question, and someone copies the answer from the documentation, and pastes it i…

> I would love to know the psychology behind this phenomenon.

Laziness. It's usually faster to ask someone a question than to look up the answer. I used to do this on IRC when learning a new programming language and it saved me a lot of time. If you want an even faster answer, you guess the wrong answer and wait for someone to correct you (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law).

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#39

Post by dimino » Fri, May 13, 2016, 5:30 PM UTC

adekok wrote: post #32

dimino wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could reasonably ride a horse to work every day, it's only 2 miles.

And where would you get said horse? Where would you keep it? What would you feed it? Who would take care of it? Students should be capable of reading text . If they can't, they belong in kindergarten, not university.

My farm, my stable, oats, and me, because people have been riding horses places for the past 5,000+ years in my metaphor (where a car is the bot and a horse is a web page), and there's no good reason to not ride a horse (use a web page).

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#40

Post by drhayes9 » Fri, May 13, 2016, 5:30 PM UTC

adekok wrote: post #29

collyw wrote: post #25

Rather than inventing sophisticated chat bots, couldn't he have just had a well organised web page? If the question were where is assignment two / when is assignment due. The examples given seem like a "high tech" (possibly unreliable) solution to a low tech problem.

Having written documentation for end users, that will work for only a portion of them. Probably most, which is good. But there are a significant percentage of users who can't (or won't) read documentation. Even they do manage to read it, they don't understand it. For some reason, human interaction works better for those people. They ask a question, and someone copies the answer from the documentation, and pastes it i…

In this specific instance, I wonder if some people, when panicking about their courses or under a deadline, are comforted by the notion that a TA is out there and willing to help them.