Project description
We’ve built a (very basic) chatbot system for training students and health professionals in the interviewing technique Motivational Interviewing; this chatbot is being used as a teaching activity in some of the University’s topics and short courses. There is a lot of scope for extending the website functionality (Masters projects), requiring skills in web dev, especially JavaScript on the client and server (Node). There is also a huge opportunity for a research project (Hons or Masters), as the chatbot currently has only a fixed repertoire of things it can say and respond to (it’s multiple-choice-driven). We want to allow the chatbot to begin to understand free-text input using natural language processing techniques. Due to the subtle nature of the domain we are dealing with (expression of empathy for clients, true understanding of their circumstances, awareness of hidden implications of statements, etc.), this is a very challenging problem, which will be a cool challenge for trying out the capabilities of large language models such as GPT, as well as exploring some of the more interesting hybrid symbolic-neural approaches.
Assumed knowledge
Web Development (Masters project) Good computer programming skills, and basic AI or Machine learning knowledge (Hons or Masters Research Project)
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