Challenges and Opportunities of Applying Natural Language Processing in Business Process Management

Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 2791–2801 Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, August 20-26, 2018. 2791 Challenges and Opportunities of Applying Natural Language Processing in Business Process Management Han van der Aa Humboldt University Berlin, Germany vanderah@hu-berlin.de Josep Carmona Univ. Polit`ecnica de Catalunya Barcelona, Spain jcarmona@cs.upc.edu Henrik Leopold Vrije Univ. Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands h.leopold@vu.nl Jan Mendling Vienna Univ. of Economics and Business Vienna, Austria jan.mendling@wu.ac.at Llu´ıs Padr´o Univ. Polit`ecnica de Catalunya Barcelona, Spain padro@cs.upc.edu Abstract The Business Process Management (BPM) field focuses in the coordination of labor so that or- ganizational processes are smoothly executed in a way that products and services are properly delivered. At the same time, NLP has reached a maturity level that enables its widespread ap- plication in many contexts, thanks to publicly available frameworks. In this position paper, we show how NLP has potential in raising the benefits of BPM practices at different levels. In- stead of being exhaustive, we show selected key challenges were a successful application of NLP techniques would facilitate the automation of particular tasks that nowadays require a significant effort to accomplish. Finally, we report on applications that consider both the process perspective and its enhancement through NLP. 1 Introduction In the last decade, the maturity achieved by Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies, together with the explosion of big data and deep learning techniques, have turned the spotlight to the possibilities offered by NLP approaches for a variety of novel applications. Many of these applications are situated in a business setting where documents and textual data is extensively used to manage production, logistics, accounting, and procurement, to give just a few examples. These application areas have in common that they relate to various business processes that are executed inside a company and beyond. Organizing business processes in an efficient and effective manner is the overarching objective of busi- ness process management. Classically, business process management has been many concerned with the quantitative analysis of key performance dimensions such as time, cost, quality, and flexibility (Dumas et al., 2013) without taking the automatic processing of textual data too much into account. Recent re- search highlights the potential of NLP-based analysis techniques (Leopold, 2013; Mendling et al., 2015; Mendling et al., 2017) to support many business process management tasks in a scalable fashion. In this paper, we describe the application of NLP techniques to BPM, where the focus rests on the pro- cesses that an organization must carry out on its daily activities, and on how are they modeled, updated, optimized, and shared with the relevant stakeholders. We believe that the NLP community has much to offer to BPM, as well as many interesting challenges to address, and we aim to display the most relevant in this paper. The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 describes the background of our research. Section 3 provides an outline how NLP could inform business process management tasks in the future. Section 4 highlights the potential impact of …

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