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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18374 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18374/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 11 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Councils in Action: Automating the Curation of Municipal Governance Data for Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09110/) (2022)
- [User Experience In Dataset Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15861/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [NLP for Local Governance Meeting Records: A Focus Article on Tasks, Datasets, Metrics and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08162/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.