Intelligent Personal Research Assistant

Abstract

Research is popularly known as a process. Many undergraduate, master and even doctoral students find it challenging to go through the research process comfortably. In this sense, novice researchers find pitfalls in the systematic literature review, research problem definition, methodology formulation, and evaluation. At present, some software solutions are available for supporting only specific steps such as literature review, data collection and data analysis. In filling this gap, we have developed an Intelligent Personal Research Assistant, InPRA, which can support the complete research process and scientific writing. InPRA has been powered by language processing, semantic analysis based on topic modelling, and machine learning in artificial intelligence. Based on the profile of a research student, InPRA recommends literature, guide through a systematic literature review leading to the definition of a research problem, formulating a methodology and executing it to generate a conclusion based on an evaluation. InPRA has a distinct feature to guide through writing papers and a thesis incrementally while conducting the research. Based on the evaluation results, the relatedness of the articles generated by InPRA is higher than traditional keyword-based searching. A supervisor can also use this software to monitor and keep track of the progress of their research student.