Student Chatbot Marcel (EMNLP’25)

At this year’s EMNLP in Suzhou, China, Jan Trienes presented Marcel—a RAG-based conversational agent built to handle enrollment questions at Marburg University (Trienes et al., 2025). The project grew out of a simple observation: as our M.Sc. Data Science program expanded, so did the repetitive workload for staff answering student inquiries about deadlines, prerequisites, and language requirements. So, we set up a project.

How Marcel Works

• Precision answers: Pulls up-to-date information from university resources (websites, exam regulations) using retrieval-augmented generation.
• Designed for real-world use: A Vue.js frontend and FastAPI backend make it adaptable, while an admin dashboard lets non-technical staff adjust FAQ retrieval.
• Privacy-first: Runs on-premise in containers, with no external dependencies.

Marcel is already in use, but we’re always open to suggestions—or collaborations with other institutions facing similar challenges.

Reference

1. Jan Trienes, Anastasiia Derzhanskaia, Roland Schwarzkopf, Markus Mühling, Jörg Schlötterer, and Christin Seifert. Marcel: A Lightweight and Open-Source Conversational Agent for University Student Support. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations. 2025.
   BibTeX

   @inproceedings{Trienes2025_emnlp_marcel-chatbot,
     author = {Trienes, Jan and Derzhanskaia, Anastasiia and Schwarzkopf, Roland and M{\"u}hling, Markus and Schl{\"o}tterer, J{\"o}rg and Seifert, Christin},
     booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations},
     title = {Marcel: A Lightweight and Open-Source Conversational Agent for University Student Support},
     year = {2025},
     address = {Suzhou, China},
     editor = {Habernal, Ivan and Schulam, Peter and Tiedemann, J{\"o}rg},
     month = nov,
     pages = {181--195},
     publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
     code = {https://github.com/aix-group/marcel-chat},
     doi = {10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-demos.13},
     isbn = {979-8-89176-334-0},
     url = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-demos.13/}
   }