INESC TEC brought citizens closer to local politics with AI – now the technology is available to everyone 

The Artificial Intelligence models developed within the CitiLink project are now easily accessible, opening the doors to collaboration and the continuous evolution of solutions aimed at increasing municipal transparency. 

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) models behind CitiLink – a platform developed by INESC TEC in partnership with the University of Beira Interior and the University of Porto, which transforms municipal meeting minutes into structured and easily accessible information – are now openly and transparently available to the scientific community and potential users. 

INESC TEC has made all information related to the AI models developed during the project available on the Hugging Face platform. Researchers, companies and developers can now examine in detail and explore (or reuse) algorithms focused on Natural Language Processing (NLP) that CitiLink refined to interpret and summarise municipal meeting minutes. 

“This approach facilitates collaboration and the continuous evolution of the models, fostering synergies and paving the way for the development of new applications,” said Ricardo Campos, INESC TEC researcher, lecturer at the University of Beira Interior and project coordinator. 

In practical terms, CitiLink led to a system capable of automatically processing municipal minutes in European Portuguese and structuring documents to identify participants, segment and classify topics, and detect and interpret voting outcomes. Six municipalities provided meeting minutes for the development of the prototype. 

Municipal authorities continue to feed the system with new minutes, and the researchers have already received “several expressions of interest” in exploring the models. According to Ricardo Campos, making the research openly and transparently available was “one of the requirements” of the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), which funded the project. 

Moreover, this open approach to solutions and technologies meets INESC TEC’s strategic commitment to open-source solutions, aimed at promoting transparency and maximising the impact of research outcomes. This commitment was formalised this year with the launch of the OSS (Open-Source Software) initiative, which brings together and makes accessible a set of cross-cutting solutions that can be reused across different scientific and technological contexts.