CitiLink-Minutes: A Multilayer Annotated Dataset of Municipal Meeting Minutes
This addresses a gap for researchers in NLP and IR by providing a new annotated dataset for municipal governance records, though it is incremental as it builds on existing work for parliamentary data.
The paper tackles the lack of annotated datasets for municipal meeting minutes in NLP and IR by introducing CitiLink-Minutes, a multilayer dataset of 120 European Portuguese minutes with over 38,000 annotations, and provides baseline results for tasks like metadata extraction and topic classification.
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.