The popularity of mobile devices and conversational agents in recent years has seen wide use of chatbots in different educational scenarios. In relation to the advances in mobile devices and conversational agents, there are few research works concerning the design and evaluation of domain-specific chatbots to fulfill the demand of mobile learning. To address this issue, we propose an agent-based conceptual architecture to develop a domain-specific chatbot for mobile learning. We extend the open-domain DeepQA agent to make it sensitive to restricted domain questions by building a domain-specific gate, and employ WeChat as user interface. To evaluate our chatbot, subjective and objective criteria are employed to assess its effectiveness. Additionally, its usability evaluation proceeds with system usability scale questionnaire and net promoter score simultaneously. In total, 18 domain experts participated in the evaluation of effectiveness, and 52 participants were involved in the evaluation of usability. Based on the evaluation results, we conclude that our chatbot can serve as an effective information retrieval tool in a specific domain. The perceived usability of our chatbot tends to be moderate and marginal and has positively affected the promotion of our chatbot for mobile learning. This paper contributes to the educative application of chatbots in specific subject fields.

中文翻译：

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CBET：针对移动学习的特定领域聊天机器人的设计和评估

近年来，移动设备和会话代理的普及已经看到了聊天机器人在不同教育场景中的广泛使用。关于移动设备和会话代理的进步，针对满足移动学习需求的特定领域聊天机器人的设计和评估的研究工作很少。为了解决此问题，我们提出了一种基于代理的概念体系结构，以开发用于移动学习的特定领域聊天机器人。我们通过构建特定于域的门来扩展开放域DeepQA代理，使其对受限域问题敏感，并采用微信作为用户界面。要评估我们的聊天机器人，将采用主观和客观标准来评估其有效性。另外，其可用性评估将同时进行系统可用性量表调查问卷和净启动子评分。总共有18位领域专家参与了有效性评估，有52位参与者参与了可用性评估。根据评估结果，我们得出结论，我们的聊天机器人可以在特定领域中充当有效的信息检索工具。我们的聊天机器人的感知可用性趋于适度和边际，并积极影响了我们的聊天机器人在移动学习中的推广。本文为聊天机器人在特定学科领域的教育应用做出了贡献。我们得出的结论是，我们的聊天机器人可以在特定领域中充当有效的信息检索工具。我们的聊天机器人的感知可用性趋于适度和边际，并积极影响了我们的聊天机器人在移动学习中的推广。本文为聊天机器人在特定学科领域的教育应用做出了贡献。我们得出的结论是，我们的聊天机器人可以在特定领域中充当有效的信息检索工具。我们的聊天机器人的感知可用性趋于适度和边际，并积极影响了我们的聊天机器人在移动学习中的推广。本文为聊天机器人在特定学科领域的教育应用做出了贡献。