Recently, Moroccan international students Hana Kouiriti and Yasmine Ait Haddou have successfully launched PearlAi, an intelligent Q&A chatbot designed to provide 24-hour accurate inquiry services for all international students at our university. The birth of this smart system not only showcases the students’ spirit of innovation but also brings a new level of convenience to university administration and communication between faculty and students.
In 2023, Hana Kouiriti and Yasmine Ait Haddou came to NPU to study Computer Science and Technology. They noticed that many important university announcements and pieces of information were scattered across multiple platforms, with some only available in Chinese. This made it challenging for them to understand university regulations, access academic resources, and adapt to campus life. Seeing that many fellow international students faced the same difficulties, they came up with a bold idea: to develop an AI assistant exclusively for international students at NPU.
In November 2023, they embarked on the development of PearlAi. During the preparation phase, they extensively gathered institutional documents and conducted in-depth research on the challenges international students face in their academic and daily lives. By July 2024, they launched the initial model experiment. After testing models such as Mistral 7B and DeepSeek, they ultimately selected the Qwen model for its optimal balance of performance and efficiency. However, due to limited resources, they had to rely on Google Colab for training, frequently encountering issues like session disconnections, long processing times, and usage restrictions. To overcome these challenges, they continuously optimized their code. In January 2025, they successfully integrated an RAG system and fine-tuned the model by improving prompt engineering. This marked a breakthrough—PearlAi’s response quality significantly improved, its response time was reduced, and its ability to understand campus-related queries was greatly enhanced.
Currently, PearlAi is built on an advanced RAG framework, integrating over 70,000 structured data entries related to international student management regulations, academic resources, visa policies, and more. This vast database encompasses a wide range of issues that students and faculty may encounter in their academic and daily lives. Whether it’s course inquiries, visa guidance, or campus facility usage, PearlAi can provide fast and accurate responses to frequently asked questions, achieving a coverage rate of over 85%.
To achieve millisecond-level information retrieval, PearlAi leverages the powerful capabilities of the FAISS vector database. Additionally, it integrates a deeply optimized Mistral-7 language model, ensuring an accuracy rate of over 90% for academic and procedural inquiries. This means that students and faculty can receive professional and reliable answers almost instantly, significantly enhancing the efficiency of information access.
In terms of operational mechanisms, PearlAi employs a dual-backup strategy to ensure both the stability and accuracy of its services. The system’s built-in database automatically updates every seven days, keeping it aligned with university policy changes and academic schedules. At the same time, a multi-API key rotation strategy effectively mitigates service interruption risks, ensuring that students and faculty can rely on this intelligent assistant anytime. Currently, PearlAi supports both Chinese and English, with an average response time of under two seconds, significantly enhancing the user experience.
During the testing phase, PearlAi successfully handled over 3,000 real consultation cases, achieving an error rate of less than 3%. This outstanding performance demonstrates its practicality and stability, proving the maturity of its technology and laying a solid foundation for large-scale deployment. With PearlAi now officially launched, the workload on administrative consultation services will be significantly reduced, leading to improved efficiency and quality in university services.
Regarding plans for PearlAi, Hana and Yasmine already have clear ideas in mind. They plan to develop iOS and Android mobile applications, integrate multilingual voice interaction, and incorporate an intelligent campus map to help students navigate both the university and key locations in Xi’an. Additionally, they aim to connect PearlAi with the university’s official systems, enabling personalized scheduling and notification services for students, further enhancing their campus experience.
Source: International College
Translator: Mei Leyun
