Say It in Your Own Words: Defining Declarative Process Models Using Speech Recognition

Abstract

Declarative, constraint-based approaches have been proposed to model loosely-structured business processes, mediating between support and flexibility. A notable example is the Declare framework, equipped with a graphical declarative language whose semantics can be characterized with several logic-based formalisms. Up to now, the main problem hampering the use of Declare constraints in practice has been the difficulty of modeling them: Declare's formal notation is difficult to understand for users without a background in temporal logic, whereas its graphical notation has been shown to be unintuitive. Therefore, in this work, we present and evaluate an analysis toolkit that aims at bypassing this issue by providing users with the possibility to model Declare constraints using their own way of expressing them. The toolkit contains a Declare modeler equipped with a speech recognition mechanism. It takes as input a vocal statement from the user and converts it into the closest (set of) Declare constraint(s). The constraints that can be modeled with the tool cover the entire Multi-Perspective extension of Declare (MP-Declare), which complements control-flow constraints with data and temporal perspectives. Although we focus on Declare, the work presented in this paper represents the first attempt to test the feasibility of speech recognition in business process modeling as a whole.

A Machine Translation Like Approach to Generate Business Process Model from Textual Description

“…The approach used Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques that identify activities and their inter-relations from textual constraint descriptions. Later this work has been extended by the same authors in [20] where they presented an interactive approach that takes vocal statements from the user as input and employs speech recognition to convert them into multi-perspective, declarative process models.…”

Execution of Multi-Perspective Declarative Process Models Using Complex Event Processing

“…Additionally, there is the target condition ϕ t which only refers to the payload of event B and is written as ϕ t (y). Depending on the use case a time period can also be defined in which the rule must be fulfilled [8]. The complete constraint would therefore be described as: if a machine essential for ongoing production is down, maintenance has to be initiated by the same vendor, which also has to be available for maintenance within the defined time frame.…”