CitiLink: Enhancing Municipal Transparency and Citizen Engagement through Searchable Meeting Minutes
This work addresses transparency and citizen engagement in local government by making meeting minutes more accessible, though it is incremental as it applies existing NLP/IR methods to a new domain.
The authors tackled the problem of inefficient access to municipal meeting minutes by developing CitiLink, a platform that uses LLMs to extract and structure data from 120 minutes across six Portuguese municipalities, enabling searchable access with BM25 ranking and faceted filtering.
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.