VotIE: Information Extraction from Meeting Minutes
This addresses the challenge of automating information extraction from local democratic records for municipalities, though it is incremental as it builds on existing corpora and methods.
The paper tackled the problem of extracting structured voting events from heterogeneous municipal meeting minutes, establishing a benchmark and showing that fine-tuned encoders achieve 93.2% macro F1 in-domain but degrade in cross-municipality settings, while few-shot LLMs are more robust but less practical due to high computational costs.
Municipal meeting minutes record key decisions in local democratic processes. Unlike parliamentary proceedings, which typically adhere to standardized formats, they encode voting outcomes in highly heterogeneous, free-form narrative text that varies widely across municipalities, posing significant challenges for automated extraction. In this paper, we introduce VotIE (Voting Information Extraction), a new information extraction task aimed at identifying structured voting events in narrative deliberative records, and establish the first benchmark for this task using Portuguese municipal minutes, building on the recently introduced CitiLink corpus. Our experiments yield two key findings. First, under standard in-domain evaluation, fine-tuned encoders, specifically XLM-R-CRF, achieve the strongest performance, reaching 93.2\% macro F1, outperforming generative approaches. Second, in a cross-municipality setting that evaluates transfer to unseen administrative contexts, these models suffer substantial performance degradation, whereas few-shot LLMs demonstrate greater robustness, with significantly smaller declines in performance. Despite this generalization advantage, the high computational cost of generative models currently constrains their practicality. As a result, lightweight fine-tuned encoders remain a more practical option for large-scale, real-world deployment. To support reproducible research in administrative NLP, we publicly release our benchmark, trained models, and evaluation framework.