An AI-Powered Culturally Aware Chatbot for Stress Detection and Wellness Support among Pakistani University Students Using NLP and Machine Learning

Abstract:With the existing digital mental health tools specifically developed for Western settings, Pakistani students are exposed to a uniquely compounded stress situation in their university that includes academic, financial, familial, and relational stressors, which have become a serious concern for academic and psychological development of students in Pakistani universities. This paper introduces a new, AI-driven and culturally sensitive stress detection and wellness support system that is tailored to the context of Pakistani university students. The system is based on a machine learning model called Random Forest which is trained using a validated student stress data set of 1100 responses on 20 features from psychological, physiological, academic, environmental and social aspects, with an accuracy of 89.09% and a macro F1-score of 0.89, in three stress severity levels. The classification outputs are passed on to an open-source large language model through OpenRouter API, where an appropriately crafted system prompt, culturally aware, gives the model a conversation about wellness, in English, Urdu and Roman Urdu. The second most predictive stress factor in this population identified by feature importance analysis was teacher-student relationship, which is a culturally important stress factor highlighting the need for region-aware mental health systems. Future research will involve primary data collection from students at various academic levels of Pakistani Universities with the validated DASS-21 instrument focusing on the students who are moving from FSc to undergraduate studies, which is a time of being psychologically vulnerable which is under-researched.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.11199 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.11199v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.11199 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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