Abdullah: An Intelligent Arabic Conversational Tutoring System for Modern Islamic Education

This paper focuses on the development of a novel Arabic Conversational Intelligent Tutoring System (CITS) called Abdullah the tutor, Abdullah CITS is an online system that teaches students aged 10 to 12 years old the essential topics in Islam utilizing supportive evidence from the Quran and Hadith, allowing conversation, discussion and interpretation with verses in classical Arabic language by engaging in dialogue using Modern Arabic language. The proposed framework for developing Abdullah CITS is based on a Pattern Matching approach to handle the user's conversations, and to solve the complexity and ambiguity of processing the Arabic language. This paper describes the architecture of Abdullah and introduces the novel scripting language that has also been developed. The results of a pilot study are reported where the evaluation has indicated promising results.

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