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

2026-01-26

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge posed by lengthy and unstructured municipal meeting minutes, which hinder efficient public access to critical information. To overcome this, the authors propose a novel framework that integrates large language models—such as Gemini—with traditional retrieval techniques. The approach leverages the language model to automatically extract metadata and agenda items, which are then combined with BM25-based full-text search and faceted filtering to create an interactive, searchable, and structured system. Evaluated on 120 meeting minutes from six Portuguese municipalities, user studies demonstrate that the system significantly enhances usability and information retrieval efficiency, with Gemini excelling in the information extraction task. This work offers a scalable technical pathway to improve government transparency and civic engagement.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Conversational Systems for Recommendation & Retrieval
• Natural Language Processing: Information Extraction
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Agentic search
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Bridging structured and unstructured data
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Fairness-aware retrieval and ranking

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.

Problem

• municipal transparency
• citizen engagement
• meeting minutes
• information accessibility
• public documents

Innovation

• LLM-based information extraction
• searchable government minutes
• municipal transparency
• structured data from unstructured text
• citizen engagement platform