Mohamed Khoual

Work place: IMS Team, ADMIR Laboratory Rabat IT Center, ENSIAS, Mohammed V University in Rabat; Rabat, Morocco

E-mail: mohamed_khoual@um5.ac.ma

Website: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-2499-573X

Research Interests:

Biography

Mohamed Khoual received a degree in Networks and computer systems from Faculty of Sciences and technology Settat (FST) in 2018. He is currently a Ph.D student in the IMS (IT Architecture and Model Driven Systems Development team) Team of ADMIR Laboratory (Advanced Digital Enterprise Modeling and Information Retrieval Research Laboratory) at ENSIAS. His research interests include Machine Learning Approach in education domain and Data Mining.

Author Articles
NeSy-Guidance: A Neuro-Symbolic Knowledge Graph for Academic Recommendations Combining Rule-Based Reasoning and Neural Inference

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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