Ensuring Action: Identifying Unclear Actor Specifications in Textual Business Process Descriptions
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Authors
Author (Corporation)
Publication date
2016
Typ of student thesis
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Collections
Type
04B - Conference paper
Editors
Ana, Fred
Aveiro, David
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Parent work
IC3K 2016 - Proceedings of the 8th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management
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SciTePress
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Porto
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Abstract
In many organisations, business process (BP) descriptions are available in the form of written procedures, or
operational manuals. These documents are expressed in informal natural language, which is inherently open
to different interpretations. Hence, the content of these documents might be incorrectly interpreted by those
who have to put the process into practice. It is therefore important to identify language defects in written
BP descriptions, to ensure that BPs are properly carried out. Among the potential defects, one of the most
relevant for BPs is the absence of clear actors in action-related sentences. Indeed, an unclear actor might lead
to a missing responsibility, and, in turn, to activities that are never performed. This paper aims at identifying
unclear actors in BP descriptions expressed in natural language. To this end, we define an algorithm named
ABIDE, which leverages rule-based natural language processing (NLP) techniques. We evaluate the algorithm
on a manually annotated data-set of 20 real-world BP descriptions (1,029 sentences). ABIDE achieves a recall
of 87%, and a precision of 56%. We consider these results promising. Improvements of the algorithm are also
discussed in the paper.
Keywords
business process management, quality assessment, natural language processing
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ISBN
978-989-758-203-5
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Language
English
Created during FHNW affiliation
Yes
Strategic action fields FHNW
Publication status
Published
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Citation
Sanne, U., Witschel, H. F., Ferrari, A., & Gnesi, S. (2016). Ensuring Action: Identifying Unclear Actor Specifications in Textual Business Process Descriptions. In F. Ana & D. Aveiro (Eds.), IC3K 2016 - Proceedings of the 8th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management. SciTePress. https://doi.org/10.5220/0006040301400147