A Virtual Member of a Community of Practice for the Society of Petroleum Engineers: From Prototype to Deployment

Abstract:We describe the evolution of a virtual assistant, called ATHENA, designed to support the capture, retrieval, and dissemination of knowledge for members of a Community of Practice (CoP) related to the Oil and Gas sector. An evaluation of a first prototype involving 75 professionals from the Society of Petroleum Engineering (SPE) showed that ATHENA dramatically improved both their productivity and performance equality on a set of realistic well-planning tasks compare to their use of a state-of-the-art RAG baseline system. However, the evaluation also identified areas for improvement. This paper describes technical advances to our first prototype in the areas of multi-document retrieval, support for answer validation, and more focused proactive dissemination. Evaluation results show that this enhanced version of ATHENA provides better support for completing knowledge-intensive tasks related to well planning than does a state-of-the-art baseline. ATHENA has been integrated into the SPE Research Portal and is being deployed for use by the society's membership.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

arXiv:2608.19199 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2608.19199v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.19199 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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