How AI accelerates the legislative power of the Parliament of Estonia

Estonia is considered one of the most advanced digitized countries in the world. Not only are the citizens more open to new technologies, but the state has also made its point to always be ahead of the curve. The government proceedings have been paperless for almost 20 years and the parliament has used AI-supported transcriptions of its proceedings for over five years. Now it was time to speed up the legislative work of the parliament with Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The parliament of Estonia, the Riigikogu, is the representative body of Estonia that among other things passes legislation like acts and resolutions and ratifies and denounces foreign treaties that impose military and proprietary obligations and bring about changes in law.

Acts create the rules for different fields of life in Estonia upon which the functioning of the state is based. Working on acts with the lawyers of Riigikogu’s chancellery is therefore the most important and also the most time-consuming task of the Riigikogu. So, the chancellery of the Riigikogu needed a solution that would bring more efficacy to their legal department.

Mountains of data

The chancellery of the Riigikogu provides the conditions necessary for the parliament to perform its constitutional functions. While the proceeding of bills is the key task of the Riigikogu, the legal and research department advises all the 101 members of the Riigikogu, the board, the committees, the parliamentary groups and the employees working for them in order that the discussion in the parliament would be knowledge-based. The department replies to the information requests of the MPs, presents its opinions and analyses draft legislation, explanatory memoranda and other procedural documents proceeded by the Riigikogu. They also reply to information queries from the public.

Thus far all the inquiries were addressed manually and one by one by the lawyers. With the vast amount of data generated and stored by the Riigikogu, traditional methods of document retrieval are time-consuming, laborious and prone to errors, and don’t provide a good user experience for fact checking.

The solution needed to address these challenges by integrating artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) into a robust, user-friendly chatbot interface, streamlining access to information and enhancing decision-making processes.

Intelligent search with legislative credibility

We created a Nortal Tark based intelligent search solution MVP for the Chancellery of the Riigikogu that works in their internal web within the MS Azure infrastructure.

Nortal Tark works through all the documents that lawyers used to search for answers manually before, e.g., the bill information system with all the legislative documents, including the European Union ones, previous official inquiries and answers, chancellery’s public documents etc. Tark translates the incoming question for the database inquiry, finds the answer, and presents it to the respective lawyer with references to the original documents. The lawyer can then use the presented information to, for example, formulate an answer to an inquiry or compile topic sheets for the MPs.

Almost all the data involved with acts is public in Estonia and this first version of Riigikogu’s Nortal Tark implementation uses only public data.

A country’s legislative body produces a lot of documents, even when the country is as forward-thinking and thin in bureaucracy as Estonia. So, the data that needed to be worked through for the implementation was colossal.

The intelligent search application also takes into consideration the legislative credibility dimension. The aim is to pinpoint the most reliable source for inquiries, because what answers to the text search criteria, might not be the right answer from the lawyers’ perspective. For example, a simple search might come up with a document containing a similar question in it, but the lawyer needs an answer from a legislative document.

Karl-Morten Koppel, Head of IT systems of the Parliament of Estonia

"This project has provided us with valuable insights into current AI models and their capabilities. It marks an important step in identifying how and where AI can be most effectively applied to maximize benefits, with the goal of improving both efficiency and the quality of services in the future, allowing citizens, MPs, and parliamentary staff to save time and work more productively."

The main benefits of the intelligent search for Riigikogu

Better user experience

New, innovative solution

Cost-effectiveness from timesaving

Fast support

One of the primary advantages of this intelligent search system is its ability to retrieve documents quickly and accurately, which makes answering inquiries faster. Users can interact with the chatbot using natural language queries, reducing the need for extensive manual searches or specific expertise. This significantly reduces the time spent digging up documents, allowing the chancellery staff to focus more on important matters.

The intelligent search function for the chancellery of the Riigikogu is just the first step to test the waters of how the Riigikogu can benefit from genAI in the substantial work that they do. The next possible steps include making the application available to more people within the Riigikogu, moving it on-premises and adding internal data with corresponding access management to the system. The version with the public data could then be expanded to public use for the queries they might have for the Riigikogu.

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