CitiLink-Minutes: A Multilayer Annotated Dataset of Municipal Meeting Minutes

TL;DR

CitiLink-Minutes is a comprehensive, multilayer annotated dataset of European Portuguese municipal meeting minutes designed to advance NLP and IR research on local governance records.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multilayer annotated dataset with over one million tokens, structured linkages, and detailed annotations for municipal meeting minutes, filling a significant gap in available resources.

Findings

Dataset contains over 38,000 annotations across three dimensions.

Baseline models show promising results in metadata extraction and topic classification.

The dataset promotes transparency and research in local governance NLP tasks.

Abstract

City councils play a crucial role in local governance, directly influencing citizens' daily lives through decisions made during municipal meetings. These deliberations are formally documented in meeting minutes, which serve as official records of discussions, decisions, and voting outcomes. Despite their importance, municipal meeting records have received little attention in Information Retrieval (IR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), largely due to the lack of annotated datasets, which ultimately limit the development of computational models. To address this gap, we introduce CitiLink-Minutes, a multilayer dataset of 120 European Portuguese municipal meeting minutes from six municipalities. Unlike prior annotated datasets of parliamentary or video records, CitiLink-Minutes provides multilayer annotations and structured linkage of official written minutes. The dataset contains over one million tokens, with all personal identifiers de-identified. Each minute was manually annotated by two trained annotators and curated by an experienced linguist across three complementary dimensions: (1) metadata, (2) subjects of discussion, and (3) voting outcomes, totaling over 38,000 individual annotations. Released under FAIR principles and accompanied by baseline results on metadata extraction, topic classification, and vote labeling, CitiLink-Minutes demonstrates its potential for downstream NLP and IR tasks, while promoting transparent access to municipal decisions.