Abstract
Process modeling is a complex and important task in any business process management project. Gathering information to build a process model needs effort by analysts in different ways, such as interviews and document review. However, this documentation is not always well structured and can be difficult to be understood. Thus, techniques that allow the structuring and recognition of process elements in the documentation can help in the understanding of the process and, consequently, in the modeling activity. In this context, this paper proposes an approach to recognize business process elements in natural language texts. We defined a set of 32 mapping rules to recognize business process elements in texts using natural language processing techniques and which were identified through an empirical study in texts containing descriptions of a process. Furthermore, a prototype was developed and it showed promising results. The analyses of 70 texts revealed 73.61% precision, 70.15% recall and 71.82% F-measure. Moreover, two surveys showed that 93.33% of participants agree with the mapping rules and that the approach helps the analysts in both the time spent and the effort made in the process modeling task. This paper is a reiteration and an evolution of the work presented in Ferreira et al. [1].
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
https://gate.ac.uk/; last accessed 2017-10-02.
- 2.
http://www.nltk.org/; last accessed 2017-10-02.
- 3.
https://spacy.io/; last accessed 2017-10-02.
- 4.
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/PyDictionary; last accessed 2017-10-02.
- 5.
- 6.
https://www.google.com/forms/about; last accessed: 2016-11-17.
- 7.
https://goo.gl/REUmu6; last accessed 2016-11-12.
- 8.
https://goo.gl/rPLqXE; last accessed 2016-11-12.
- 9.
https://goo.gl/KuQOBw; last accessed 2016-11-12.
- 10.
https://goo.gl/MxzAAH; last accessed 2016-11-12.
References
Ferreira, R.C.B., Thom, L.H., Fantinato, M.: A semi-automatic approach to identify business process elements in natural language texts (2017)
Thom, L.H.: Gerenciamento de Processos de Negócio e Aplicabilidade na Saúde e na Robótica. Biblioteca Digital Brasileira de Computação (2012)
Thom, L., Reichert, M., Iochpe, C.: Activity patterns in process-aware information systems: basic concepts and empirical evidence. Int. J. Bus. Process Integr. Manag. (IJBPIM) 4, 93–110 (2009)
Dumas, M., Rosa, M.L., Mendling, J., Reijers, H.A.: Fundamentals of Business Process Management. Springer, Heidelberg (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33143-5
Weske, M.: Business Process Management: Concepts, Languages, Architectures. Springer, Berlin (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28616-2
Leopold, H.: Natural Language in Business Process Models. Springer, Switzerland (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04175-9
Blumberg, R., Atre, S.: The problem with unstructured data. DM Rev. 13, 62 (2003)
White, M.: Information overlook. vol. 26, p. 7 (2003)
Friedrich, F., Mendling, J., Puhlmann, F.: Process model generation from natural language text. In: Mouratidis, H., Rolland, C. (eds.) CAiSE 2011. LNCS, vol. 6741, pp. 482–496. Springer, Heidelberg (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21640-4_36
Chueng, A., Koliadis, G., Ghose, A.: Process discovery from model and text artefacts. In: 2007 IEEE Congress on Services, pp. 167–174 (2007)
Goncalves, J.C.A., Santoro, F.M., Baião, F.A.: Let me tell you a story - on how to build process models. J. Univers. Comput. Sci. 17, 276–295 (2011)
Ferreira, R.C.B., Thom, L.H., de Oliveira, J.P.M., Avila, D.T., dos Santos, R.I., Fantinato, M.: Assisting process modeling by identifying business process elements in natural language texts. In: de Cesare, S., Frank, U. (eds.) ER 2017. LNCS, vol. 10651, pp. 154–163. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70625-2_15
Santoro, F.M., Goncalves, J.C.A., Baiao, F.A.: Business process mining from group stories. In: International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design, pp. 161–166 (2009)
Jiexun, L., Wang, H.J., Zhang, Z., Zhao, J.L.: A policy-based process mining framework: mining business policy texts for discovering process models. Inf. Syst. E-Bus. Manag. 8, 169–188 (2010)
Leopold, H., Mendling, J., Polyvyanyy, A.: Supporting process model validation through natural language generation. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 40, 816–840 (2014)
Meitz, M., Leopold, H., Mendling, J.: An approach to support process model validation based on text generation. 33, 7–20 (2013)
van der Aa, H., Leopold, H., Reijers, H.A.: Detecting inconsistencies between process models and textual descriptions. In: Motahari-Nezhad, H.R., Recker, J., Weidlich, M. (eds.) BPM 2015. LNCS, vol. 9253, pp. 90–105. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23063-4_6
van der Aa, H., Leopold, H., Reijers, H.A.: Dealing with behavioral ambiguity in textual process descriptions. In: La Rosa, M., Loos, P., Pastor, O. (eds.) BPM 2016. LNCS, vol. 9850, pp. 271–288. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45348-4_16
Heinonen, O.: Optimal multi-paragraph text segmentation by dynamic programming. In: Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics - Volume 2, ACL 1998, pp. 1484–1486. Association for Computational Linguistics, Stroudsburg (1998)
Hearst, M.A.: Multi-paragraph segmentation of expository text. In: Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 1994, pp. 9–16. Association for Computational Linguistics, Stroudsburg (1994)
Hearst, M.A.: TextTiling: segmenting text into multi-paragraph subtopic passages. Comput. Linguist. 23, 33–64 (1997)
Hynes, G., Bexley, J.: Understandability of banks’ annual reports. In: 69th Association for Business Communication Annual Convention, Albuquerque, pp. 1–11 (2003)
Ferreira, R.C.B., Thom, L.H.: An approach to generate process-oriented text from natural language. In: XII Brazilian Symposium on Information Systems, p. 77 (2016)
WfMC: Wfmc: Process definition language: XPDL 2.0, p. 164 (2005)
Morris, J., Hirst, G.: Lexical cohesion computed by thesaural relations as an indicator of the structure of text. Comput. Linguist. 17, 21–48 (1991)
Allen, J.: Natural Language Understanding. Benjamin-Cummings Publishing Co., Inc., Redwood City (1995)
de Kok, D., Brouwer, H.: Natural Language Processing for the Working Programmer (2011)
Brill, E.: A simple rule-based part of speech tagger. In: Proceedings of the Third Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing, ANLC 1992, pp. 152–155. Association for Computational Linguistics, Stroudsburg (1992)
Briscoe, T., Carroll, J., Watson, R.: The second release of the RASP system. In: Proceedings of the COLING/ACL on Interactive Presentation Sessions, COLING-ACL 2006, pp. 77–80. Association for Computational Linguistics, Stroudsburg (2006)
Choi, J.D., Palmer, M.: Guidelines for the Clear Style Constituent to Dependency Conversion. Technical report 01–12, University of Colorado Boulder (2012)
OMG: Business process modeling notation (BPMN). versão 2.0.2 (2013)
Mendling, J., Neumann, G., van der Aalst, W.: Understanding the occurrence of errors in process models based on metrics. In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z. (eds.) OTM 2007. LNCS, vol. 4803, pp. 113–130. Springer, Heidelberg (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-76848-7_9
Figl, K., Recker, J., Mendling, J.: A study on the effects of routing symbol design on process model comprehension. Decis. Support Syst. 54, 1104–1118 (2013)
Kossak, F., Illibauer, C., Geist, V.: Event-based gateways: open questions and inconsistencies. In: Mendling, J., Weidlich, M. (eds.) BPMN 2012. LNBIP, vol. 125, pp. 53–67. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33155-8_5
Kindler, E.: On the semantics of EPCs: resolving the vicious circle. Data Knowl. Eng. 56, 23–40 (2006)
Mendling, J., Reijers, H.A., van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Seven process modeling guidelines (7PMG). Inf. Softw. Technol. 52, 127–136 (2010)
Mendling, J.: Managing structural and textual quality of business process models. In: Cudre-Mauroux, P., Ceravolo, P., Gašević, D. (eds.) SIMPDA 2012. LNBIP, vol. 162, pp. 100–111. Springer, Heidelberg (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40919-6_6
Mendling, J., Strembeck, M., Recker, J.C.: Factors of process model comprehension : findings from a series of experiments. Decis. Support Syst. 53, 195–206 (2012)
Mendling, J., Reijers, H.A., Cardoso, J.: What makes process models understandable? In: Alonso, G., Dadam, P., Rosemann, M. (eds.) BPM 2007. LNCS, vol. 4714, pp. 48–63. Springer, Heidelberg (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75183-0_4
Schrepfer, M., Wolf, J., Mendling, J., Reijers, H.A.: The impact of secondary notation on process model understanding. In: Persson, A., Stirna, J. (eds.) PoEM 2009. LNBIP, vol. 39, pp. 161–175. Springer, Heidelberg (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-05352-8_13
Reijers, H., Mendling, J.: Modularity in process models: review and effects. In: Dumas, M., Reichert, M., Shan, M.-C. (eds.) BPM 2008. LNCS, vol. 5240, pp. 20–35. Springer, Heidelberg (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85758-7_5
White, S.A.: BPMN Modeling and Reference Guide: Understanding and Using BPMN. Future Strategies Inc., Lighthouse Point (2008)
Japkowicz, N., Shah, M.: Evaluating Learning Algorithms: A Classification Perspective. Cambridge University Press, New York (2011)
Forbes, A.D.: Classification-algorithm evaluation: five performance measures based onconfusion matrices. J. Clin. Monit. 11, 189–206 (1995)
Manning, C.D., Raghavan, P., Schütze, H.: Introduction to Information Retrieval. Cambridge University Press, New York (2008)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ferreira, R.C.B., Silva, T.S., Avila, D.T., Thom, L.H., Fantinato, M. (2018). Recognition of Business Process Elements in Natural Language Texts. In: Hammoudi, S., Śmiałek, M., Camp, O., Filipe, J. (eds) Enterprise Information Systems. ICEIS 2017. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 321. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93375-7_27
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93375-7_27
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-93374-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-93375-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)