Work place: IMS Team, ADMIR Laboratory Rabat IT Center, ENSIAS, Mohammed V University in Rabat; Rabat, Morocco
E-mail: zineb_mcharfi@um5.ac.ma
Website: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-6242-6006
Research Interests:
Biography
Zineb Mcharfi is a Computer Science Professor and member of the IMS Team, ADMIR Laboratory Rabat IT Center at ENSIAS, Mohammed V University in Rabat; Morocco. She has directed and continues to direct numerous doctoral theses in several themes. Her research interests include the application of Artificial Intelligence in education, Software Product Line Engineering, Agile Software Development and software traceability.
By Zineb Elkaimbillah Zineb Mcharfi Mohamed Khoual Bouchra El Asri
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijmecs.2025.06.04, Pub. Date: 8 Dec. 2025
The growing complexity of academic and career decision-making requires intelligent systems that can deliver personalized recommendations while ensuring strict compliance with institutional policies and incorporating evolving contextual factors. This paper introduces NeSy-Guidance, a neuro-symbolic recommendation approach that combines symbolic rule reasoning with graph-based neural inference over a dynamic and time-aware academic Knowledge Graph (KG). The model encodes students, programs, and contextual entities including regions and emerging trends while integrating regulatory constraints derived from Moroccan admission policies. It applies a two-stage reasoning pipeline: a symbolic layer enforcing hard eligibility rules and soft preference-based adjustments mined automatically from the knowledge graph, and a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) layer trained with a weighted loss to address class imbalance and capture latent student–program compatibility. A weighted score fusion mechanism integrates both inference outputs, achieving a balance between interpretability, adaptability, and predictive performance. Evaluated on a real-world dataset of 800 students and 325 academic programs, NeSy-Guidance outperforms three state-of-the-art baselines in both accuracy and policy compliance. It achieves 83.8% accuracy, 74.5% precision@5, 75.4% F1-score, and ensures 100% compliance with institutional eligibility rules. Furthermore, a qualitative survey confirmed positive student satisfaction regarding the clarity and relevance of recommendations. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of hybrid reasoning and validate NeSy-Guidance as a reliable, explainable, and regulation-aware academic guidance system capable of adapting to regional disparities, emerging academic trends, and evolving student preferences.
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