ADASS 2022

The ESA Virtual Assistant in ESASky: enabling archival data exploration via natural language processing
2022-11-02 , ADASS Conference Room 1

ESASky (sky.esa.int) is a tool to discover multi-mission, multi-wavelength and multi-messenger astronomical data from a wide variety of ground and space missions. In order to explore new ways to access the data contents of ESASky, as well as the contents from other astronomical data centres accessible from it, the ESA Virtual Assistant (EVA) has been integrated and released to the public in mid-2022. The ESA virtual assistant uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing to allow users to interact with ESASky’s API using simple sentences. At the moment the virtual assistant has been programmed with a sufficient number of interactions to carry out most of the tasks that a typical user would do in the ESASky web interface. However, exposing the virtual assistant to a larger audience will allow us to train the neural network running behind the virtual assistant to understand more complex sentences and commands, opening new avenues for more advanced exploration of ESASky.