Knowledge Extraction from Minutes of Portuguese Municipalities Meetings

Abstract A very relevant problem in e-government is that a great amountof knowledge is in natural language unstructured documents. Ifthat knowledge was stored using a computer-processable rep-resentation it would be more easily accessed. In this paper wepresent the architecture, modules and initial results of a pro-totype under development for extracting information from gov-ernment documents. The prototype stores the information usinga formal representation of the set of concepts and the relation-ships between those concepts - an ontology. The system wastested using minutes of Portuguese Municipal Boards meetings.Initial results are presented for an important and frequent topicof the minutes: the subsidies granted by municipalities.Index Terms: entities and relations extraction, e-government,semantic query. 1. Introduction E-government relates to the use of information and communi-cation technologies (ICT) by government, including the onlineprovision of government services. These technologies have thepotential to improve the government service delivery, can em-power citizens through access to information, or make govern-ment management more efﬁcient. A great amount of informa-tion in local and central government agencies is registered inunstructured formats, making the access/query/search to it notreadily available. Although many of these documents are storedin computers, their format prevents the information they containto be computer-processable and thus they cannot be manipu-lated to meet user’s speciﬁc needs. E-government would bene-ﬁt from systems able to integrate several sources of informa tionand able to understand unstructured documents [1]. The minutes of Municipal Board meetings contain informa-tion that would beneﬁt from being made available in searchab leknowledge bases. These documents are important because mu-nicipalities are often the closest point of service for citizens andenterprises, and the minutes record the decisions of the Munic-ipal Board.In this paper we present a system able to create semanticinformation from this type of documents - natural language,un-structured - using natural language processing algorithms, in-tegrating open source software, and using external sources ofinformation as Google Maps and Geo-Net-PT01. The remain-ing of the paper starts by discussing the related work. Section2 starts with an overview of the developed system and contin-ues by elaborating on each of the three parts that compose it.In Section 3 the initial results are presented and discussed. Thepaper ends with the conclusions in Section 4 and the acknowl-edgments in Section 5.1. 1. Related WorkThe research activitydone so far in e-government isusuallycen-tered in solving problems as interoperability and service inte-gration, which are very important problems and should be fur-ther addressed. In such projects it is usually considered thatthe information is already in the system, whether placed by hu-man operators or using existing databases (e.g. OneStopGovand Access-eGov). To our knowledge, no project was dedicatedto the relevant problem of automatic acquisition of informationfrom natural language government documents [1]. Several projects were dedicated to the task of scalable, do-main independent information extraction (IE). Some are morefocused in building semantic knowledge bases from Wikipedia -DBpedia, Kylin, YAGO/NAGA and others. They generally ex-tract information from the (natural language) documents textsand use the Wikipedia’s structure to infer the semantics. Otherstate of the art systems work at the web scale - KnowItAll, Tex-tRunner. Finally, some works focus on the knowledge evolutionover time - TARSQI, Timely YAGO.