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

2026-02-12

AI Summary

This study addresses the scarcity of high-quality annotated data in municipal council minutes, which has hindered the application of natural language processing (NLP) to research on local governance transparency. To bridge this gap, the authors present a multilayer-annotated dataset comprising 120 Portuguese-language municipal meeting records, structured across three dimensions: metadata, agenda items, and voting outcomes. This resource is the first to offer structured interlinking and dual manual annotation, rigorously validated by linguists and anonymized to ensure privacy. Adhering strictly to FAIR principles, the dataset encompasses over one million tokens and more than 38,000 annotations. Accompanied by baseline model performance across multiple NLP tasks, it fills a critical void in local governance text resources and supports the development of downstream applications.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Mining of Visual, Multimedia & Multimodal Data

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data

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.

Problem

• municipal meeting minutes
• annotated dataset
• Information Retrieval
• Natural Language Processing
• local governance

Innovation

• multilayer annotation
• municipal meeting minutes
• structured linkage
• FAIR dataset
• NLP for local governance