Arabic Chatbot Technologies in Education: An Overview

The recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in general, and in Natural Language Processing (NLP) in particular, and some of its applications such as chatbots, have led to their implementation in different domains like education, healthcare, tourism, and customer service. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an increasing interest in these digital technologies to allow and enhance remote access. In education, e-learning systems have been massively adopted worldwide. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLM) such as BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformers) made chatbots even more popular. In this study, we present a survey on existing Arabic chatbots in education and their different characteristics such as the adopted approaches, language variety, and metrics used to measure their performance. We were able to identified some research gaps when we discovered that, despite the success of chatbots in other languages such as English, only a few educational Arabic chatbots used modern techniques. Finally, we discuss future directions of research in this field.