Answering Students' Questions on Course Forums Using Multiple Chain-of-Thought Reasoning and Finetuning RAG-Enabled LLM

Abstract

The course forums are increasingly significant and play vital role in facilitating student discussions and answering their questions related to the course. It provides a platform for students to post their questions related to the content and admin issues related to the course. However, there are several challenges due to the increase in the number of students enrolled in the course. The primary challenge is that students' queries cannot be responded immediately and the instructors have to face lots of repetitive questions. To mitigate these issues, we propose a question answering system based on large language model with retrieval augmented generation (RAG) method. This work focuses on designing a question answering system with open source Large Language Model (LLM) and fine-tuning it on the relevant course dataset. To further improve the performance, we use a local knowledge base and applied RAG method to retrieve relevant documents relevant to students' queries, where the local knowledge base contains all the course content. To mitigate the hallucination of LLMs, We also integrate it with multi chain-of-thought reasoning to overcome the challenge of hallucination in LLMs. In this work, we experiment fine-tuned LLM with RAG method on the HotpotQA dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that the fine-tuned LLM with RAG method has a strong performance on question answering task.