BridgeU: A Bilingual Community Platform for International Students in Thailand

Abstract

International students in Thailand face significant barriers in accessing local news, building social connections, and adapting to an unfamiliar environment. This paper presents BridgeU, a bilingual (Chinese/English) web-based community platform designed to address these challenges. BridgeU provides three integrated features: a Daily Briefing system that automatically aggregates Thai news via Google News RSS and translates it into Chinese and English using Qwen AI; a Community Page that enables peer-to-peer knowledge sharing with AI-powered moderation and translation; and an Authentication and Profile system with email and SMS verification. The system is built using Vue.js 3 on the frontend and Spring Boot 3 on the backend, with MySQL 8 as the primary database and JWT-based stateless authentication. A competitive analysis against Facebook Groups, Xiaohongshu, and Reddit confirms that BridgeU uniquely combines bilingual AI news aggregation with a structured, moderated community space. Testing covered 25 unit test suites and 21 system test cases across all features, confirming that all core functional requirements were satisfied.