From Interests to Insights: An LLM Approach to Course Recommendations Using Natural Language Queries

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Van Deventer, Hugh, Mills, Mark, Evrard, August
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Van Deventer, Hugh
Mills, Mark
Evrard, August
author_facet Van Deventer, Hugh
Mills, Mark
Evrard, August
contents Most universities in the United States encourage their students to explore academic areas before declaring a major and to acquire academic breadth by satisfying a variety of requirements. Each term, students must choose among many thousands of offerings, spanning dozens of subject areas, a handful of courses to take. The curricular environment is also dynamic, and poor communication and search functions on campus can limit a student's ability to discover new courses of interest. To support both students and their advisers in such a setting, we explore a novel Large Language Model (LLM) course recommendation system that applies a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) method to the corpus of course descriptions. The system first generates an 'ideal' course description based on the user's query. This description is converted into a search vector using embeddings, which is then used to find actual courses with similar content by comparing embedding similarities. We describe the method and assess the quality and fairness of some example prompts. Steps to deploy a pilot system on campus are discussed.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_19312
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Interests to Insights: An LLM Approach to Course Recommendations Using Natural Language Queries
Van Deventer, Hugh
Mills, Mark
Evrard, August
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
H.3
Most universities in the United States encourage their students to explore academic areas before declaring a major and to acquire academic breadth by satisfying a variety of requirements. Each term, students must choose among many thousands of offerings, spanning dozens of subject areas, a handful of courses to take. The curricular environment is also dynamic, and poor communication and search functions on campus can limit a student's ability to discover new courses of interest. To support both students and their advisers in such a setting, we explore a novel Large Language Model (LLM) course recommendation system that applies a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) method to the corpus of course descriptions. The system first generates an 'ideal' course description based on the user's query. This description is converted into a search vector using embeddings, which is then used to find actual courses with similar content by comparing embedding similarities. We describe the method and assess the quality and fairness of some example prompts. Steps to deploy a pilot system on campus are discussed.
title From Interests to Insights: An LLM Approach to Course Recommendations Using Natural Language Queries
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
H.3
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19312