Towards a Natural Language Conversational Interface for Process Mining

Lecture notes in business information processing, pp. 268–280

Abstract

Abstract Despite all the recent advances in process mining, making it accessible to non-technical users remains a challenge. In order to democratize this technology and make process mining ubiquitous, we propose a conversational interface that allows non-technical professionals to retrieve relevant information about their processes and operations by simply asking questions in their own language. In this work, we propose a reference architecture to support a conversational, process mining oriented interface to existing process mining tools. We combine classic natural language processing techniques (such as entity recognition and semantic parsing) with an abstract logical representation for process mining queries. We also provide a compilation of real natural language questions (aiming to form a dataset of that sort) and an implementation of the architecture that interfaces to an existing commercial tool: Everflow. Last but not least, we analyze the performance of this implementation and point out directions for future work.

Authors 4

1. Luciana Barbieri corresponding

   Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP)

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute of Computing, University of Campinas (Unicamp), Campinas, Brazil

2. Edmundo R. M. Madeira

   Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP)

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute of Computing, University of Campinas (Unicamp), Campinas, Brazil

3. Kleber Stroeh
   Affiliation as printed

   Everflow Process Mining, Campinas, Brazil

4. Wil M. P. van der Aalst Aachen

   Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology · RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT, Sankt Augustin, Germany

   RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany