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Abstract

We propose and evaluate a question-answering system that uses decomposed prompting to classify and answer student questions on a course discussion board. Our system uses a large language model (LLM) to classify questions into one of four types: conceptual, homework, logistics, and not answerable. This enables us to employ a different strategy for answering questions that fall under different types. Using a variant of GPT-3, we achieve 81% classification accuracy. We discuss our system’s performance on answering conceptual questions from a machine learning course and various failure modes.

Supported by Vector Institute, NSERC, Fujitsu, Amazon Research Award, and the CIFAR AI Chairs Program.

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Correspondence to Brandon Jaipersaud .

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Jaipersaud, B., Zhang, P., Ba, J., Petersen, A., Zhang, L., Zhang, M.R. (2023). Decomposed Prompting to Answer Questions on a Course Discussion Board. In: Wang, N., Rebolledo-Mendez, G., Dimitrova, V., Matsuda, N., Santos, O.C. (eds) Artificial Intelligence in Education. Posters and Late Breaking Results, Workshops and Tutorials, Industry and Innovation Tracks, Practitioners, Doctoral Consortium and Blue Sky. AIED 2023. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1831. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36336-8_33

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36336-8_33

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