In many application domains, a process execution is captured using natural language. Think of medical records, customer complaints, legal records… The same holds for process models: they can be captured as text for medical guidelines, user manuals, legal regulations are typical examples of such cases. Such data forms a new challenge for the process mining field, since traditional process mining techniques need to be augmented with Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. The first steps in this direction were made in a recent Master thesis “Local Process Model Extraction from Textual Data” by Fatemeh Shafiee. In that work process fragments were mined from separate sentences of the text. The next challenge is in building bigger fragments from the elementary process fragments mined.
Contact: Dr. Natalia Sidorova.