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Process models are an important means to capture information on organizational operations and often represent the starting point for process analysis and improvement. Since the manual elicitation and creation of process models is a time-intensive endeavor, a variety of techniques have been developed that automatically derive process models from textual process descriptions. However, these techniques, so far, only focus on the extraction of traditional, imperative process models. The extraction of declarative process models, which allow to effectively capture complex process behavior in a compact fashion, has not been addressed. In this paper we close this gap by presenting the first automated approach for the extraction of declarative process models from natural language. To achieve this, we developed tailored Natural Language Processing techniques that identify activities and their inter-relations from textual constraint descriptions. A quantitative evaluation shows that our approach is able to generate constraints that closely resemble those established by humans. Therefore, our approach provides automated support for an otherwise tedious and complex manual endeavor.
Anomaly detection in process mining aims to recognize outlying or unexpected behavior in event logs for purposes such as the removal of noise and identification of conformance violations. Existing techniques for this task are primarily frequency-based, arguing that behavior is anomalous because it is uncommon. However, such techniques ignore the semantics of recorded events and, therefore, do not take the meaning of potential anomalies into consideration. In this work, we overcome this caveat and focus on the detection of anomalies from a semantic perspective, arguing that anomalies can be recognized when process behavior does not make sense. To achieve this, we propose an approach that exploits the natural language associated with events. Our key idea is to detect anomalous process behavior by identifying semantically inconsistent execution patterns. To detect such patterns, we first automatically extract business objects and actions from the textual labels of events. We then compare these against a process-independent knowledge base. By populating this knowledge base with patterns from various kinds of resources, our approach can be used in a range of contexts and domains. We demonstrate the capability of our approach to successfully detect semantic execution anomalies through an evaluation based on a set of real-world and synthetic event logs and show the complementary nature of semantics-based anomaly detection to existing frequency-based techniques.
Law smells
(2022)
Building on the computer science concept of code smells, we initiate the study of law smells, i.e., patterns in legal texts that pose threats to the comprehensibility and maintainability of the law. With five intuitive law smells as running examples-namely, duplicated phrase, long element, large reference tree, ambiguous syntax, and natural language obsession-, we develop a comprehensive law smell taxonomy. This taxonomy classifies law smells by when they can be detected, which aspects of law they relate to, and how they can be discovered. We introduce text-based and graph-based methods to identify instances of law smells, confirming their utility in practice using the United States Code as a test case. Our work demonstrates how ideas from software engineering can be leveraged to assess and improve the quality of legal code, thus drawing attention to an understudied area in the intersection of law and computer science and highlighting the potential of computational legal drafting.