Aligning textual and model-based process descriptions

Abstract

Process model descriptions are an ubiquitous source of information that exists in any organization. To reach different types of stakeholders, distinct descriptions are often kept, so that process understandability is boosted with respect to individual capabilities. While the use of distinct representations allows more stakeholders to interpret process information, it also poses a considerable challenge: to keep different process descriptions aligned. In this paper, a novel technique to align process models and textual descriptions is proposed. The technique is grounded on projecting knowledge extracted from these two representations into a uniform representation that is amenable for comparison. It applies a tailored linguistic analysis of each description, so that the important information is considered when aligning description’ elements. Compared to existing approaches that address this use case, our technique provides more comprehensive alignments, which encompass process model activities, events and gateways. Furthermore, the technique, which has been implemented into the platform nlp4bpm.cs.upc.edu, shows promising results based on experiments with real-world data.