On the refactoring of activity labels in business process models

Abstract

Large corporations increasingly utilize business process models for documenting and redesigning their operations. The extent of such modeling initiatives with several hundred models and dozens of often hardly trained modelers calls for automated quality assurance. While formal properties of control flow can easily be checked by existing tools, there is a notable gap for checking the quality of the textual content of models, in particular, its activity labels. In this paper, we address the problem of activity label quality in business process models. We designed a technique for the recognition of labeling styles, and the automatic refactoring of labels with quality issues. More specifically, we developed a parsing algorithm that is able to deal with the shortness of activity labels, which integrates natural language tools like WordNet and the Stanford Parser. Using three business process model collections from practice with differing labeling style distributions, we demonstrate the applicability of our technique. In comparison to a straightforward application of standard natural language tools, our technique provides much more stable results. As an outcome, the technique shifts the boundary of process model quality issues that can be checked automatically from syntactic to semantic aspects.

Managing Structural and Textual Quality of Business Process Models

“…Therefore, it has been found difficult to use standard natural language processing tools like the Stanford parser. The approach reported in [54] uses different contextual information to map a label that, for instance, starts with the word plan to its correct labeling style. Once the labeling style is known, tools like WordNet can be used to find a verb that matches an action that was formulated as a noun (see Figure 3).…”

“…Once the labeling style is known, tools like WordNet can be used to find a verb that matches an action that was formulated as a noun (see Figure 3). It has been shown that this approach works accurately for three different modeling collections from practice including altogether more than 10,000 activity labels [54].…”

“…Make decision starts with a verb and continues with a business object. This is usually considered to be the norm structure of an activity label [4,5,6,7,8]. The other three labels use a gerund or a noun to express the work content of the activity.…”

Creating and Updating Personalized and Verbalized Business Process Descriptions

“…In this component, we use the linguistic label analysis technique from [21] to recognize the different label patterns that exist for activity labels in the process view. In this way, for instance, we are able to decompose an activity label such as Choose Contact Type into the action Choose and the business object Contact Type.…”

Automatic Business Process Model Translation with BPMT

“…Nevertheless, prior research highlighted the challenges that are associated with the automatic analysis of natural language in process models [2]. Since process model labels do not contain full and grammatically correct sentences, the application of standard tools for natural language processing such as parsers turned out to be hardly possible.…”