Parliamentary records more accessible with new AI search engine

Open to public, it uses advanced keyword matching and contextual search to generate more relevant results

- Goh Yan Han

An artificial intelligence (AI)-powered search engine has been launched that makes combing through decades of parliamentary records more fruitful for the public, and which could raise understanding of how issues evolve in Singapore's top law-making body.

Called Pair Search, the website search.pair.gov.sg is powered by a large language model (LLM) - the same technology behind ChatGPT - and also lets users sift through case judgments from the High Court and Court of Appeal.

Early results from test users of the prototype search engine have been encouraging, said Open Government Products (OGP) senior software engineer Oh Chin Yang.

OGP is an experimental development arm of the Government that builds technology for the public. The search engine project was conceived at its annual hackathon, as the team felt recent strides in natural language processing and information retrieval could make for a more effective search tool for both public officers and citizens, said Mr Oh.

"The best public policy decision and debate is an informed one, and that starts with search," he told The Straits Times.

Based on data since it was softlaunched at the start of 2024, 84 per cent of all users who clicked on at least one search result found their searches within the first 10 results shown to them, said Mr Oh, who is one of six members of the Pair product team.

As at April, there have been approximately 2,700 users on Pair Search for parliamentary records, with a combined total of 8,300 search queries, he added.

While there is an existing search platform for Hansard - the official record of debates in Parliament it is "difficult and unintuitive" to use, said the Pair Search team on the OGP hackathon's website.