AI-Based Chatbot for Education: Design, Architecture, and Empirical Evaluation

Abstract: Modern higher education is characterized by an exponential expansion of digital study materials; however, students continue to encounter friction in locating syllabus-aligned, context-aware academic resolutions in real time. Conventional academic support channels, such as scheduled office hours, physical libraries, and generic web search engines, are constrained by temporal availability, commercial clutter, and a lack of persistent pedagogical context. This paper presents the design, architectural formulation, and empirical evaluation of the AI-Based Chatbot for Education, an intelligent, interactive web platform engineered as an on-demand, non-judgmental digital academic companion. Built upon a modular stack incorporating Python 3.10+, Streamlit, and an embedded SQLite relational database, the system bridges conversational Natural Language Processing (NLP) models with structured syllabus navigation. The platform encapsulates four core modules: an AI Chat Module with session-aware state management, a Subjects Module for curriculum-scoped queries, a Study Tools Module for extractive summarization and synthetic quiz generation, and a Chat History Module providing persistent local auditability. Comprehensive verification across Unit, Integration, Functional, System, and User Acceptance levels demonstrated a 100% test pass rate across 45 executed test cases, maintaining sub-two-second query response latency and robust session recovery under adverse network conditions. Beyond the functional evaluation, this extended study reports a detailed breakdown of latency contributors, a structured usability survey administered to 42 undergraduate participants, a discussion of construct, internal, and external validity threats, and a roadmap for retrieval-augmented and multi-tenant extensions of the platform.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Educational Chatbot, Streamlit, SQLite, Pedagogical Assistants, Prompt Engineering, Human-Computer Interaction, Software Verification, Usability Evaluation.