SMART Chatbots in the E-learning Domain: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies implied significant growth in various domains. Furthermore, many companies integrate AI technologies into their products to enhance the quality of their services. Chatbots are among the AI technologies widely used in several areas, especially E-learning. Chatbots support learners in their learning processes by helping them to find the appropriate answers to their questions. We aim to conduct a systematic literature review (SLR) to uncover the use of AI chatbots to offload teachers from repetitive and massive tasks. This article surveys the literature over the period 2016–2022 on the use of AI chatbots in the E-learning domain as they automatically answer learners’ questions. Thus, we identify, collect, and synthesize multiple research studies on the application of AI chatbots in the E-learning field. Based on the renowned frameworks, PRISMA and PICO, we have succeeded in (1) Developing our research questions and (2) Automatically implementing a solution based on Python language to analyze selected papers, highlighting research gaps, and opening new windows to guide our future works. Our study shows that chatbots effectively interact with learners. However, there are some drawbacks: (1) Educational chatbots are still limited in their local Knowledge Base (KB), which makes them unable to answer students’ questions correctly. Thus, Chatbot’s KB needs to be extended through external sources, enabling the chatbot to update its KB over time, making it rich and saving time. (2) Lack of reliable external sources to enrich the chatbot’s KB and make it up to date. (3) Lack of educational chatbots with smart services such as speech recognition and sentiment analysis to boost the user experience and make learning easier. In our SLR, we discuss these limitations and propose some solutions to fill the gap.