Challenge

Every year, Flemish deputies put about 10,000 parliamentary questions to the members of the Flemish Government. In doing so, the minister very often appeals to the expertise within the public administration.

Both the dispatching of parliamentary questions to the right employee and the formulation of a draft answer for the cabinet of the competent minister take a lot of time. It is not obvious to know where a question is (with whom) and what its status is. For staff members who need to answer a question it is not obvious to start writing an answer and to know what has been previously asked and written about a particular topic.

Parliament Assistant is the project name for the development of a platform that provides support to government entities in coordinating and answering parliamentary questions, using artificial intelligence. It includes smart functionalities that:

• support parliamentary question coordinators in dispatching questions to the appropriate file handler(s).
• support the file handlers in the preliminary response process by generating an initial suggestion of response based on relevant data sources.