2026
Authors
Damas, J; Nunes, S;
Publication
PROGRESS IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, EPIA 2025, PT II
Abstract
Understanding user behavior in search systems is essential for improving retrieval effectiveness and user satisfaction. While prior research has extensively examined general-purpose web search engines, domain-specific contexts-such as sports information-remain comparatively underexplored. In this study, we analyze over 400,000 interaction log entries from a sports-oriented search engine collected over a two-week period. Our analysis combines classic query-level metrics (e.g., frequency distributions, query lengths) with a detailed examination of click behavior, including entropy-based intent variability and a custom query quality scoring model. Compared to established baselines from general and specialized search environments, we observe a high proportion of new and single-term queries, as well as a notable lack of representativeness among top queries. These findings reveal patterns shaped by the event-driven and entity-centric nature of sports content, offering actionable insights for the design of domain-specific retrieval systems.
2026
Authors
Campos, R; Sequeira, R; Nerea, S; Cantante, I; Folques, D; Cunha, LF; Canavilhas, J; Branco, A; Jorge, A; Nunes, S; Guimaraes, N; Silvano, P;
Publication
ADVANCES IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL, ECIR 2026, PT IV
Abstract
Fact-checking remains a demanding and time-consuming task, still largely dependent on manual verification and unable to match the rapid spread of misinformation online. This is particularly important because debunking false information typically takes longer to reach consumers than the misinformation itself; accelerating corrections through automation can therefore help counter it more effectively. Although many organizations perform manual fact-checking, this approach is difficult to scale given the growing volume of digital content. These limitations have motivated interest in automating fact-checking, where identifying claims is a crucial first step. However, progress has been uneven across languages, with English dominating due to abundant annotated data. Portuguese, like other languages, still lacks accessible, licensed datasets, limiting research, Natural Language Processing (NLP) developments, and applications. In this paper, we introduce ClaimPT, a dataset of European Portuguese news articles annotated for factual claims, comprising 1,308 articles and 6,875 individual annotations. Unlike most existing resources based on social media or parliamentary transcripts, ClaimPT focuses on journalistic content, collected through a partnership with LUSA, the Portuguese News Agency. To ensure annotation quality, two trained annotators labeled each article, with a curator validating all annotations according to a newly proposed scheme. We also provide baseline models for claim detection, establishing initial benchmarks and enabling future NLP and Information Retrieval (IR) applications. By releasing ClaimPT, we aim to advance research on low-resource fact-checking and enhance understanding of misinformation in news media.
2026
Authors
Silva, R; Evans, J; Isidro, J; Marques, M; Fonseca, A; Morais, R; Canavilhas, J; Pasquali, A; Silvano, P; Jorge, A; Guimaraes, N; Nunes, S; Campos, R;
Publication
ADVANCES IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL, ECIR 2026, PT IV
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 min 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 Geminis performance in extracting relevant information from the minutes, highlighting its performance in data extraction.
2026
Authors
Evans, JP; Cunha, LF; Silvano, P; Jorge, A; Guimarães, N; Nunes, S; Campos, R;
Publication
CoRR
Abstract
2026
Authors
Isidro, J; Cunha, LF; Silvano, P; Jorge, A; Guimarães, N; Nunes, S; Campos, R;
Publication
CoRR
Abstract
2026
Authors
Marques, M; Fernandes, AL; Pacheco, AF; Rebouças, R; Cantante, I; Isidro, J; Cunha, LF; Jorge, A; Guimarães, N; Nunes, S; Leal, A; Silvano, P; Campos, R;
Publication
WWW
Abstract
Municipal meeting minutes are formal records documenting the discussions and decisions of local government, yet their content is often lengthy, dense, and difficult for citizens to navigate. Automatic summarization can help address this challenge by producing concise summaries for each discussion subject. Despite its potential, research on summarizing discussion subjects in municipal meeting minutes remains largely unexplored, especially in low-resource languages, where the inherent complexity of these documents adds further challenges. A major bottleneck is the scarcity of datasets containing high-quality, manually crafted summaries, which limits the development and evaluation of effective summarization models for this domain. In this paper, we present CitiLink-Summ, a new corpus of European Portuguese municipal meeting minutes, comprising 120 documents and 2,880 manually hand-written summaries, each corresponding to a distinct discussion subject. Leveraging this dataset, we establish baseline results for automatic summarization in this domain, employing state-of-the-art generative models (e.g., BART, PRIMERA) as well as large language models (LLMs), evaluated with both lexical and semantic metrics such as ROUGE, BLEU, METEOR, and BERTScore. CitiLink-Summ provides the first benchmark for municipal-domain summarization in European Portuguese, offering a valuable resource for advancing NLP research on complex administrative texts.
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