Ensuring Action: Identifying Unclear Actor Specifications in Textual Business Process Descriptions

Ulf Sanne, Hans Friedrich Witschel, Alessio Ferrari, Stefania Gnesi

2016

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.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Sanne U., Witschel H., Ferrari A. and Gnesi S. (2016). Ensuring Action: Identifying Unclear Actor Specifications in Textual Business Process Descriptions . In Proceedings of the 8th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management - Volume 3: KMIS, (IC3K 2016) ISBN 978-989-758-203-5, pages 140-147. DOI: 10.5220/0006040301400147

in Bibtex Style

@conference{kmis16,
author={Ulf Sanne and Hans Friedrich Witschel and Alessio Ferrari and Stefania Gnesi},
title={Ensuring Action: Identifying Unclear Actor Specifications in Textual Business Process Descriptions},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 8th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management - Volume 3: KMIS, (IC3K 2016)},
year={2016},
pages={140-147},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006040301400147},
isbn={978-989-758-203-5},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 8th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management - Volume 3: KMIS, (IC3K 2016)
TI - Ensuring Action: Identifying Unclear Actor Specifications in Textual Business Process Descriptions
SN - 978-989-758-203-5
AU - Sanne U.
AU - Witschel H.
AU - Ferrari A.
AU - Gnesi S.
PY - 2016
SP - 140
EP - 147
DO - 10.5220/0006040301400147