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Detecting Inconsistencies Between Process Models and Textual Descriptions

  • Conference paper
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Business Process Management (BPM 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9253))

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Abstract

Text-based and model-based process descriptions have their own particular strengths and, as such, appeal to different stakeholders. For this reason, it is not unusual to find within an organization descriptions of the same business processes in both modes. When considering that hundreds of such descriptions may be in use in a particular organization by dozens of people, using a variety of editors, there is a clear risk that such models become misaligned. To reduce the time and effort needed to repair such situations, this paper presents the first approach to automatically identify inconsistencies between a process model and a corresponding textual description. Our approach leverages natural language processing techniques to identify cases where the two process representations describe activities in different orders, as well as model activities that are missing from the textual description. A quantitative evaluation with 46 real-life model-text pairs demonstrates that our approach allows users to quickly and effectively identify those descriptions in a process repository that are inconsistent.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Faculty of Sciences, De Boelelaan 1081, 1081HV, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Han van der Aa, Henrik Leopold & Hajo A. Reijers

  2. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, PO Box 513, 5600MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Hajo A. Reijers

Authors
  1. Han van der Aa
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  2. Henrik Leopold
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  3. Hajo A. Reijers
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Han van der Aa .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California, USA

    Hamid Reza Motahari-Nezhad

  2. Queensland University, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Jan Recker

  3. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Matthias Weidlich

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van der Aa, H., Leopold, H., Reijers, H.A. (2015). Detecting Inconsistencies Between Process Models and Textual Descriptions. In: Motahari-Nezhad, H., Recker, J., Weidlich, M. (eds) Business Process Management. BPM 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9253. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23063-4_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23063-4_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-23062-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-23063-4

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