Retrieval Chatbot to Support Idea Generation in Opinion-Based Persuasive Writing

WEGO is a technology-based writing intervention package to support the composition of high-quality essays by students with and without high-incidence disabilities struggling with writing. While existing evidence shows that WEGO can significantly improve students' organization of ideas for a more cohesive opinion-based final product, the challenge to generate those ideas remains. Thus, the WEGO team developed an AI-based brainstorming feature to integrate into the existing intervention. In collaboration with partnering school systems and following their policies and guidelines around artificial intelligence, a retrieval-based chatbot, named Ask Boris AI was developed. It supports idea generation during the brainstorming phase of the writing process. Ask Boris AI addresses teachers’ and school districts’ concern for using open generative chatbots by providing a conversational AI system using a predefined set of responses stored in a knowledge base. While Ask Boris AI does not generate new content, it stimulates users to identify possible ideas related to a writing prompt based on their need in a controlled environment as desired by many practitioners. This article describes how multiple data sources were used to make design decisions and generate a curated knowledge base using existing WEGO essays.