TQ-Bot: An AIML-based Tutor and Evaluator Bot

Intelligent Tutoring Systems are computer programs that aim at providing personalized instruction to students. In recent years, conversational robots, usually known as chatterbots, become very popular in the Internet, and ALICE (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) is probably the most popular one. ALICE brain is written in AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language), an open XML language. We have considered the combination of both approaches, i.e, the use of AIML-based bots for tutoring purposes in open e-Learning platforms such as Claroline or Moodle. With that aim in mind, we have developed a bot (chatterbot) for helping the students during their learning process and for supporting the activities of the teacher. This bot (TQ-Bot) is able to analyse the requests made by the learners in written natural language and to provide adequate and domain specific answers orienting the student to the right course contents. Besides, TQ-Bot is able to track and supervise the student progress by means of personalized questionnaires. This bot has been developed and integrated as user-friendly modules in Claroline and Moodle.