1988 Reports

An Experiment with the Student Advisor System

Lim, Jong G.

This report summarizes a trial of the Student Advisor, a natural language question-answering system developed at Columbia University to assist computer science majors in course selection, carried out during the Spring '88 registration period with students from the Department of Computer Science. Included in this report are a brief overview of the current status of the system, a description of the circumstances present at the time of the trial, a list of answered and unanswered questions, and a statistical summary of all the questions asked. The report is useful as a benchmark for future development of the system and as a casual reference on the behavior and appropriateness of a natural language Q/A system for anyone who is working towards building one.