Student Builds Offline AI Chatbot to Search Fırat University Regulation PDFs

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Yiğit, a third-year software engineering student at Fırat University in Turkey, developed an open-source offline chatbot called FiratUniversityChatbot to help users search through complex university regulation documents. The tool uses a custom BM25 search index with Turkish-language optimizations, including synonym expansion and bigram matching, to return exact text snippets and source page numbers. Built with Python, FastAPI, and pdfplumber, the system avoids cloud-based AI models entirely, eliminating the risk of hallucinated answers. One of the key engineering challenges was accurately extracting text from poorly formatted, multi-column university PDFs without mixing up content. The project is publicly available on GitHub and can be run locally or via Docker, with a live demo hosted on Hugging Face Spaces.

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