Introducing a Chatbot Assistant for deal.II Tutorials

[Mehdi Memar]

Dear deal.II Community,

I hope this message finds you well. I am excited to announce that I have developed a chatbot assistant designed to assist users with questions specifically related to the tutorials available in the deal.II documentation.

This assistant sources information from all 90 tutorials currently provided in the deal.II documentation. While it does not cover the entire deal.II documentation, it aims to help users by answering questions related to the library's functionality, applications, use cases, and specific functions or classes as demonstrated in the tutorials.

I have always admired the deal.II library and its potential, and contributing to this open-source project has been a goal of mine. I hope this assistant will be a valuable tool for the community and help users make the most of the library's tutorials.

You can access the assistant here:

https://huggingface.co/spaces/mma666/dealii_assistant

and also learn more about the project here:

https://github.com/mma666/deal.II-Assistant-github

I look forward to your feedback and hope that users of the deal.II library find this assistant helpful.

Best regards,

Mehdi Memar

[Luca Heltai]

Dear Mehdi,

I looked at the source code of the chatbot, and found it very interesting and selfcontained. I did play around with the chat bot a bit and I thought about the following:

do you think that RAG with langchain will manage the indexing of the test suite?

There are tons of example codes, minimal, self contained, that show how to use single features of the library inside the testsuite (dealii/tests/*/*cc, with expected output ./dealii/tests/*/*output).

This may be a corpus that is too big for RAG, but it may be possible to do fine tuning with it, and it would be tremendously useful.

Would you like to give this a shot? If this works out well, I think we could point to the chatbot from the main webpage of the library.

L.

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[Mehdi Memar]

Dear Professor Heltai,

Thank you for your interest in the project and for the insightful suggestions. I reviewed the test suite, and I agree that incorporating it could add significant value. I'll work on adding the test files to the database to see their impact and will keep you updated on the progress.

Best regards,
Mehdi

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/dealii/1E782988-B0AF-4A70-81AA-DDAED4870A9B%40gmail.com.

[blais...@gmail.com]

Dear Mehdi,

Thank you for this initiative!

We all appreciate it ;)!

[Mehdi Memar]

Dear Bruno,

Thank you for the kind words! I'm glad to hear the positive response. Looking forward to continuing our work together toward our shared goals. After all, we all love deal.II and its brothers! :)

Best regards,
Mehdi

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/dealii/2eb3dae5-f1c9-4128-a750-a3d4fbef42f8n%40googlegroups.com.

[Mehdi Memar]

Dear deal.II Community,

I am excited to introduce the second version of the deal.II Assistant, now covering 90 tutorials as well as the test suite available in the library’s source code. This update is possible thanks to Professor Heltai’s suggestion.

As you may know, LLMs are available at varying levels of capability, and their intelligence directly impacts response quality. To provide a range of options, I’ve set up the assistant in two modes: one using an LLM with standard capabilities (Command-R) and another with advanced capabilities (Command-R-Plus). This setup allows for experimentation with both models to observe the differences in their responses. Please note that the advanced mode is temporary due to higher costs. I’ve outlined a method to use this advanced model for free on the related GitHub page for those interested. In general, the advanced LLM provides more accurate responses and better citations.

You can access the assistant in standard mode here:

https://huggingface.co/spaces/mma666/dealii_assistant_test_suite_standard

and in advanced mode here:

https://huggingface.co/spaces/mma666/dealii_assistant_test_suite_plus

The project’s GitHub page is also available here:

https://github.com/mma666/deal.II-Assistant-with-test-suite-github

I look forward to your feedback and hope the assistant proves helpful to the deal.II community.

Best regards,
Mehdi