Transforming Mentorship: An AI Powered Chatbot Approach to University Guidance

University students face immense challenges during their undergraduate lives, often being deprived of personalized on-demand guidance that mentors fail to provide at scale. Digital tools exist, but there is a serious lack of customized coaching for newcomers. This paper presents an AI-powered chatbot that will serve as a mentor for the students of BRAC University. The main component is a data ingestion pipeline that efficiently processes and updates information from diverse sources, such as CSV files and university webpages. The chatbot retrieves information through a hybrid approach, combining BM25 lexical ranking with ChromaDB semantic retrieval, and uses a Large Language Model, LLaMA-3.3-70B, to generate conversational responses. The generated text was found to be semantically highly relevant, with a BERTScore of 0.831 and a METEOR score of 0.809. The data pipeline was also very efficient, taking 106.82 seconds for updates, compared to 368.62 seconds for new data. This chatbot will be able to help students by responding to their queries, helping them to get a better understanding of university life, and assisting them to plan better routines for their semester in the open-credit university.

Gazetteer-Enhanced Bangla Named Entity Recognition with BanglaBERT Semantic Embeddings K-Means-Infused CRF Model

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a sub-task of Natural Language Processing (NLP) that distinguishes entities from unorganized text into predefined categorization. In recent years, a lot of Bangla NLP subtasks have received quite a lot of attention; but Named Entity Recognition in Bangla still lags behind. In this research, we explored the existing state of research in Bangla Named Entity Recognition. We tried to figure out the limitations that current techniques and datasets face, and we would like to address these limitations in our research. Additionally, We developed a Gazetteer that has the ability to significantly boost the performance of NER. We also proposed a new NER solution by taking advantage of state-of-the-art NLP tools that outperform conventional techniques.