BHFF Junior Scholar Adna Čičko Presents Research at 17th Days of BHAAAS

Junior Scholar Adna Čičko participated in the symposium Computer Science, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, held as part of the 17th Days of BHAAAS, where she presented research developed in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and educational technology.

The research was conducted in collaboration with Azra Šošić, under the mentorship of Professor Dželila Mehanović and teaching assistant Ilma Gusinac at the International Burch University.

Their project, titled Study Buddy, focuses on the application of NLP techniques to support learning through the automatic generation of quiz questions from lecture materials. The system is designed as a hybrid rule-based solution that transforms lecture slides into structured question–answer pairs, helping students prepare for exams and reinforce knowledge through active recall.

Motivated by findings in educational psychology that highlight the effectiveness of self-testing over passive learning methods, the research addresses the challenge of time-consuming manual creation of practice questions. Study Buddy processes lecture slides in PDF format through multiple stages, including text extraction, cleaning, filtering, concept identification, question generation, and validation.

A key contribution of the work is the development of a hybrid NLP pipeline that combines grammatical analysis with semantic concept extraction. This approach enables the system to identify relevant educational content and convert it into meaningful questions while maintaining interpretability and efficiency.

The evaluation of the system demonstrated strong results, including high coverage in question generation and positive feedback from students, who recognized the generated content as useful for exam preparation.

Unlike many approaches that rely on large-scale language models, Study Buddy provides a lightweight and accessible alternative that can be applied across different educational contexts.

Adna’s participation at the 17th Days of BHAAAS highlights the growing role of BHFF Scholars in contributing to innovative solutions at the intersection of technology and education.