German Light Verb Constructions in Business Process Models

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 4606–4610 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 4606 German Light Verb Constructions in Business Process Models Kristin Kutzner, Ralf Laue University of Applied Sciences Zwickau, Germany Dr.-Friedrichs-Ring 2a, 08056 Zwickau Kristin.Kutzner@fh-zwickau.de, Ralf.Laue@fh-zwickau.de Abstract We present a resource of German light verb constructions extracted from textual labels in graphical business process models. Those models depict the activities in processes in an organization in a semi-formal way. From a large range of sources, we compiled a repository of 2,301 business process models. Their textual labels (altogether 52,963 labels) were analyzed. This produced a list of 5,246 occurrences of 846 light verb constructions. We found that the light verb constructions that occur in business process models differ from light verb constructions that have been analyzed in other texts. Hence, we conclude that texts in graphical business process models represent a specific type of texts that is worth to be studied on its own. We think that our work is a step towards better automatic analysis of business process models because understanding the actual meaning of activity labels is a prerequisite for detecting certain types of modelling problems. Keywords: German, light verb construction, support verb construction, Funktionsverbgef¨uge, business process, busi- ness process model 1. Background of our Research 1.1. Business Process Models Business process models (BPM) are visual representa- tions of processes in an organization. They can serve as a base for communication between the stakeholders in a process improvement project. They can also be used for training new employees or for verifying that legal compliance rules are enforced. Last but not least, BPM are used for automating processes using software applications that manage to keep track of the state of the process, to distribute work and related data and to execute certain steps (such as computations) automati- cally. Usually, BPM are created using visual languages specifically designed for modelling business processes, such as BPMN (Object Management Group (OMG), 2011) or Event-Driven Process Chains (EPCs). As the majority of BPM analyzed in our work use the modelling language EPC, the specifics of textual la- bels will be discussed by example of EPC diagrams. EPCs consist of functions (tasks that need to be ex- ecuted, depicted as rounded boxes), events (pre- and postconditions before/after a function is executed, de- picted as hexagons) and connectors (which can split or join the flow of control between the elements, allowing to model parallel and alternative executions). Arcs be- tween these elements represent the control flow. From the example in Fig. 1, it can be observed that a com- mon way to label a function is to use a verb phrase containing a verb and its dependents (in particular, one or more objects). Also, it can be seen that events serve two purposes. They can describe a (pre-)condition for executing a task or a state that can be observed at some point of time in a process. Note that …

Content truncated to 500 words