The historical archives of the European Parliament now speak directly to citizens

The Artificial Intelligence revolution is reaching many aspects of our daily lives, including how we look into our past. The Archives Unit Dashboard is an innovative project developed by the Archives Unit of the European Parliament that aims to democratise the knowledge about this institution's history, assisting citizens and researchers in navigating the archives. And now, thanks to its implementation of AI technology, it even enables them to chat directly with the Archive's documents. The site can be accessed by anyone and allows users to directly ask questions such as 'Who was Simone Veil' and 'What was the Maastricht Treaty'?

The new tool is based on a type of artificial intelligence called Large Language Model (LLM). Trained to understand natural language, this kind of AI can process the users' queries and generates specific answers (Generative AI). To accomplish this, it analyses, extracts, and connects information from the vast collection of documents that the Archives Unit's team has digitalised and uploaded online. The technique behind it is deep learning.

How does it work? Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)

Once the tool receives a query, it identifies its key words and looks for documents with the potential relevance in an index. The site uses a standard AI that has been provided with specific knowledge: an index with more than 100,000 documents from the European Parliament Archives. This solution, called Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), was invented in 2020 and allows improved accuracy and reliability of generative AI models with facts fetched from external sources.

The tool selects documents from the index that it considers relevant to answering the user's question and packages them into the query. Then, thanks to the generative AI, it is able to read all the materials and produce an explanatory short text that is more understandable for the user.

How to use it

The tool is available through this link. Select the option "Select Dashboard: content-analysis" (top right) and then "Ask the EP archives". The documents to which the tool has access go from 1952 with the Common Assembly of the European Coal and Steel Community, the Ad Hoc Assembly and the European Parliament to 1994. Even if they are mainly in French, thanks to automated translation, the tool can be used in 55 languages.