Requirements Nobody Wrote Down: Emergence in a Public-Sector ML Pipeline

Ronivaldo Ferreira, Vinicius Costa Girard, Cleidson de Souza, Igor Steinmacher, Carla Aguiar +2

Governments increasingly use machine learning (ML) to handle data volumes beyond their analytical capacity, yet little is known about how requirements arise and evolve as an ML experiment moves toward operational use. Requirements Engineering (RE) for ML often assumes that requirements can be elicited upfront; in the public sector, however, demands arrive vague, stakeholders speak different professional languages, and what counts as a ``good'' result is unknown in advance. We report a 15-month case study of a thematic classification pipeline for Brazil's national digital participation platform, which holds over 60,000 citizen proposals, triangulating 43 project artifacts with interviews of six project participants. Institutional demands arrived as broad goals, endorsed but not sponsored, and only 40\% of the 95 reconstructed requirements and criteria were ever formalized. The pipeline's key requirements emerged largely from experiments, model outputs, and integration work, shaped by technical decisions and institutional constraints; the central one, the classification categories, was settled by a government taxonomy chosen for its institutional legitimacy. Acceptance relied on…