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 Gemini’s performance in extracting relevant information from the minutes, highlighting its performance in data extraction. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2026.

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Abstract The proliferation of misinformation poses a significant challenge to societies, and fact-checking emerges as a critical tool to combat this issue. In this work, we conduct an innovation impact assessment to question the use of technology to combat misinformation, specifically examining the ethical implications of this choice. To address this, we organized a workshop using the value sensitive design (VSD) methodology to explore questions in this context. The workshop introduced participants to the VSD framework, enabling them to critically assess whether specific scenarios align with human values, norms, and requirements. Real-world scenarios were discussed, including approaches implemented by legitimate news outlets and using 3D virtual characters by a Brazilian television employing deep learning. Participants analyzed how technology impacts journalism values, norms, and practices, focusing on aligning synthetic media technologies with automated fact-checking dissemination. In conclusion, the authors prepared recommendations from valuable insights into the complex ethical considerations surrounding synthetic media technologies for automatic fact-checking dissemination. It also facilitated cross-border discussions, with 11 participants from seven countries engaging in fruitful dialogue on this vital topic. The study proposed evaluation criteria for AI-generated content in this diversity, including privacy protection, inclusiveness, transparency, beauty standards conformity, engagement, meaningfulness, and effortlessness.

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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 four complementary dimensions: (1) personal information, (2) metadata, (3) subjects of discussion, and (4) 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.