Empirical Analysis of Sentence Templates and Ambiguity Issues for Business Process Descriptions

Abstract

Business process management has become an increasingly present activity in organizations. In this context, approaches that assist in the identification and documentation of business processes are presented as relevant efforts to make organizations more competitive. To achieve these goals, business process descriptions are considered as a useful artifact in both identifying business processes and complementing business process documentation. However, approaches that automatically generate business process descriptions do not explain how the sentence templates that compose the text were selected. This selection influences the quality of the text, as it may produce ambiguous or non-recurring sentences, which could make it difficult to understand the process. In this work, we present an empirical analysis of 64 business process descriptions in order to find recurrent sentence templates and filter them for ambiguity issues. The analysis made it possible to find 101 sentence templates divided into 29 categories. In addition, 13 of the sentence templates were considered to have ambiguity issues based on the adopted criteria. These findings may support other approaches in generating process descriptions more suitable for process analysts and domain experts.