🎓 College FAQ Chatbot (IIST Indore)

An AI-powered College FAQ Assistant built to help students get instant, accurate, and structured information about Indore Institute of Science and Technology (IIST Indore).

This chatbot answers queries related to admissions, courses, hostel facilities, placements, exams, and general college information through a clean and interactive UI.

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Key Features

• 💬 AI-based conversational chatbot
• 🎯 Strictly answers queries related to specific college (IIST Indore)
• ⚡ Fast responses using Groq LLM
• 🧠 RAG-ready architecture for future upgrades
• 🌐 Clean and responsive frontend UI
• 🔒 Secure API key handling via application.properties

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What is RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)?

RAG is an AI technique where the chatbot retrieves information from a trusted data source and then generates answers based only on that data.

Why RAG in this project?

• Prevents hallucinated or incorrect answers
• Ensures college-specific accuracy
• Allows easy updates by changing data files
• Scales well for future enhancements

Currently, the project is RAG-ready and uses structured college data.
Full vector-based RAG (embeddings + database) can be added in future versions.

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Tech Stack

Backend

• Java
• Spring Boot
• REST APIs
• Groq LLM API

Frontend

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript (Vanilla)

AI / NLP

• Groq (LLaMA 3.1)
• Prompt engineering
• RAG-ready design

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📁 Project Structure

college-faq-chatbot
│
├── src/main/java/com/college/collegefaqchatbot
│   ├── controller
│   │   └── ChatController.java
│   ├── service
│   │   └── ChatService.java
│   └── CollegeFaqChatbotApplication.java
│
├── src/main/resources
│   ├── static
│   │   ├── index.html
│   │   ├── script.js
│   │   └── style.css
│   ├── application.properties
│   └── college_data.txt
│
├── .gitignore
├── pom.xml
└── README.md

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How to Run Locally

1️. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/vv-verse/college-faq-chatbot.git
cd college-faq-chatbot

2️. Configure API Key

Add your Groq API key in:

src/main/resources/application.properties

Example:

groq.api.key=YOUR_API_KEY_HERE

3️. Run the application

mvn spring-boot:run

4️. Open in browser

http://localhost:8080

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Future Enhancements

• ✅ Full RAG with vector database
• 🔐 Email OTP verification
• 🧾 Student details form (email, phone, branch)
• 🗄️ Database integration
• 📊 Admin dashboard
• 🌍 Deployment on cloud

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⚠️ Important Notes

• The chatbot does not answer unrelated questions

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Author

Vivek Kumar
B.Tech CSE
IIST Indore

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