CitiLink: Enhancing Municipal Transparency and Citizen Engagement through Searchable Meeting Minutes

TL;DR

CitiLink is a platform that uses NLP and IR techniques, including LLMs, to convert unstructured municipal meeting minutes into searchable, structured data to improve transparency and citizen engagement.

Contribution

The paper introduces CitiLink, a novel system that leverages LLMs and IR methods to structure and search municipal meeting minutes, enhancing accessibility.

Findings

CitiLink effectively extracts metadata, subjects, and voting outcomes.

The system improves searchability and user interaction with municipal minutes.

Gemini's data extraction performance is validated in real-world municipal data.

Abstract

City council minutes are typically lengthy and formal documents with a bureaucratic writing style. Although publicly available, their structure often makes it difficult for citizens or journalists to efficiently find information. In this demo, we present CitiLink, a platform designed to transform unstructured municipal meeting minutes into structured and searchable data, demonstrating how NLP and IR can enhance the accessibility and transparency of local government. The system employs LLMs to extract metadata, discussed subjects, and voting outcomes, which are then indexed in a database to support full-text search with BM25 ranking and faceted filtering through a user-friendly interface. The developed system was built over a collection of 120 minutes made available by six Portuguese municipalities. To assess its usability, CitiLink was tested through guided sessions with municipal personnel, providing insights into how real users interact with the system. In addition, we evaluated Gemini's performance in extracting relevant information from the minutes, highlighting its effectiveness in data extraction.