# Agent Smith: Teaching Question Answering to Jill Watson

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.13677 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13677/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [EDA: Easy Data Augmentation Techniques for Boosting Performance on Text Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11196/) (2019)
- [A Survey of Data Augmentation Approaches for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03075/) (2021)
- [Logic-Guided Data Augmentation and Regularization for Consistent Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10157/) (2020)
- [An Overview of Machine Teaching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.05927/) (2018)
- [Iterative Machine Teaching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.10470/) (2017)
- [XLDA: Cross-Lingual Data Augmentation for Natural Language Inference and Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11471/) (2019)
- [AI-Powered Learning: Making Education Accessible, Affordable, and Achievable](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.01908/) (2020)
- [A Survey Investigating Usage of Virtual Personal Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04606/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [AI-TA: Towards an Intelligent Question-Answer Teaching Assistant using Open-Source LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02775/) (2023)
- [LittleMu: Deploying an Online Virtual Teaching Assistant via Heterogeneous Sources Integration and Chain of Teach Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05935/) (2023)
- [A Framework for Interactive Knowledge-Aided Machine Teaching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10357/) (2022)
- [Explanation as Question Answering based on a Task Model of the Agent's Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05030/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Building AI agents can be costly. Consider a question answering agent such as Jill Watson that automatically answers students' questions on the discussion forums of online classes based on their syllabi and other course materials. Training a Jill on the syllabus of a new online class can take a hundred hours or more. Machine teaching - interactive teaching of an AI agent using synthetic data sets - can reduce the training time because it combines the advantages of knowledge-based AI, machine learning using large data sets, and interactive human-in-loop training. We describe Agent Smith, an interactive machine teaching agent that reduces the time taken to train a Jill for a new online class by an order of magnitude.