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Main Authors: Hellert, Thorsten, Agladze, Nikolay, Giovannone, Alex, Jug, Jan, Mayet, Frank, Sherwin, Mark, Sulc, Antonin, Tennant, Chris
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18779
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author Hellert, Thorsten
Agladze, Nikolay
Giovannone, Alex
Jug, Jan
Mayet, Frank
Sherwin, Mark
Sulc, Antonin
Tennant, Chris
author_facet Hellert, Thorsten
Agladze, Nikolay
Giovannone, Alex
Jug, Jan
Mayet, Frank
Sherwin, Mark
Sulc, Antonin
Tennant, Chris
contents Modern experimental platforms such as particle accelerators, fusion devices, telescopes, and industrial process control systems expose tens to hundreds of thousands of control and diagnostic channels accumulated over decades of evolution. Operators and AI systems rely on informal expert knowledge, inconsistent naming conventions, and fragmented documentation to locate signals for monitoring, troubleshooting, and automated control, creating a persistent bottleneck for reliability, scalability, and language-model-driven interfaces. We formalize semantic channel finding-mapping natural-language intent to concrete control-system signals-as a general problem in complex experimental infrastructure, and introduce a four-paradigm framework to guide architecture selection across facility-specific data regimes. The paradigms span (i) direct in-context lookup over curated channel dictionaries, (ii) constrained hierarchical navigation through structured trees, (iii) interactive agent exploration using iterative reasoning and tool-based database queries, and (iv) ontology-grounded semantic search that decouples channel meaning from facility-specific naming conventions. We demonstrate each paradigm through proof-of-concept implementations at four operational facilities spanning two orders of magnitude in scale-from compact free-electron lasers to large synchrotron light sources-and diverse control-system architectures, from clean hierarchies to legacy environments. These implementations achieve 90-97% accuracy on expert-curated operational queries.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_18779
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Natural Language to Control Signals: A Conceptual Framework for Semantic Channel Finding in Complex Experimental Infrastructure
Hellert, Thorsten
Agladze, Nikolay
Giovannone, Alex
Jug, Jan
Mayet, Frank
Sherwin, Mark
Sulc, Antonin
Tennant, Chris
Computation and Language
Accelerator Physics
Modern experimental platforms such as particle accelerators, fusion devices, telescopes, and industrial process control systems expose tens to hundreds of thousands of control and diagnostic channels accumulated over decades of evolution. Operators and AI systems rely on informal expert knowledge, inconsistent naming conventions, and fragmented documentation to locate signals for monitoring, troubleshooting, and automated control, creating a persistent bottleneck for reliability, scalability, and language-model-driven interfaces. We formalize semantic channel finding-mapping natural-language intent to concrete control-system signals-as a general problem in complex experimental infrastructure, and introduce a four-paradigm framework to guide architecture selection across facility-specific data regimes. The paradigms span (i) direct in-context lookup over curated channel dictionaries, (ii) constrained hierarchical navigation through structured trees, (iii) interactive agent exploration using iterative reasoning and tool-based database queries, and (iv) ontology-grounded semantic search that decouples channel meaning from facility-specific naming conventions. We demonstrate each paradigm through proof-of-concept implementations at four operational facilities spanning two orders of magnitude in scale-from compact free-electron lasers to large synchrotron light sources-and diverse control-system architectures, from clean hierarchies to legacy environments. These implementations achieve 90-97% accuracy on expert-curated operational queries.
title From Natural Language to Control Signals: A Conceptual Framework for Semantic Channel Finding in Complex Experimental Infrastructure
topic Computation and Language
Accelerator Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18779