Akhil Kumar

Akhil Kumar, Jianliang Leon Zhao, Om Dobariya

In this paper, we report our experience with several LLMs for their ability to understand a process model in an interactive, conversational style, find syntactical and logical errors in it, and reason with it in depth through a natural language (NL) interface. Our findings show that a vanilla, untrained LLM like ChatGPT (model o3) in a zero-shot setting is effective in understanding BPMN process models from images and answering queries about them intelligently at syntactic, logic, and semantic levels of depth. Further, different LLMs vary in performance in terms of their accuracy and effectiveness. Nevertheless, our empirical analysis shows that LLMs can play a valuable role as assistants for business process designers and users. We also study the LLM's "thought process" and ability to perform deeper reasoning in the context of process analysis and optimization. We find that the LLMs seem to exhibit anthropomorphic properties.

Ho-Pun Lam, Mustafa Hashmi, Akhil Kumar

Binary "YES-NO" notions of process compliance are not very helpful to managers for assessing the operational performance of their company because a large number of cases fall in the grey area of partial compliance. Hence, it is necessary to have ways to quantify partial compliance in terms of metrics and be able to classify actual cases by assigning a numeric value of compliance to them. In this paper, we formulate an evaluation framework to quantify the level of compliance of business processes across different levels of abstraction (such as task,trace and process level) and across multiple dimensions of each task (such as temporal, monetary, role-, data-, and quality-related) to provide managers more useful information about their operations and to help them improve their decision making processes. Our approach can also add social value by making social services provided by local, state and federal governments more flexible and improving the lives of citizens.

Chen Qian, Lijie Wen, Akhil Kumar

Process consistency checking (PCC), an interdiscipline of natural language processing (NLP) and business process management (BPM), aims to quantify the degree of (in)consistencies between graphical and textual descriptions of a process. However, previous studies heavily depend on a great deal of complex expert-defined knowledge such as alignment rules and assessment metrics, thus suffer from the problems of low accuracy and poor adaptability when applied in open-domain scenarios. To address the above issues, this paper makes the first attempt that uses deep learning to perform PCC. Specifically, we proposed TraceWalk, using semantic information of process graphs to learn latent node representations, and integrates it into a convolutional neural network (CNN) based model called TraceNet to predict consistencies. The theoretical proof formally provides the PCC's lower limit and experimental results demonstrate that our approach performs more accurately than state-of-the-art baselines.

Chen Qian, Lijie Wen, Akhil Kumar et al.

Process model extraction (PME) is a recently emerged interdiscipline between natural language processing (NLP) and business process management (BPM), which aims to extract process models from textual descriptions. Previous process extractors heavily depend on manual features and ignore the potential relations between clues of different text granularities. In this paper, we formalize the PME task into the multi-grained text classification problem, and propose a hierarchical neural network to effectively model and extract multi-grained information without manually-defined procedural features. Under this structure, we accordingly propose the coarse-to-fine (grained) learning mechanism, training multi-grained tasks in coarse-to-fine grained order to share the high-level knowledge for the low-level tasks. To evaluate our approach, we construct two multi-grained datasets from two different domains and conduct extensive experiments from different dimensions. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with statistical significance and further investigations demonstrate its effectiveness.

Chen Qian, Lijie Wen, Akhil Kumar

Sharing process models on the web has emerged as a common practice. Users can collect and share their experimental process models with others. However, some users always feel confused about the shared process models for lack of necessary guidelines or instructions. Therefore, several process translators have been proposed to explain the semantics of process models in natural language (NL). We find that previous studies suffer from information loss and generate semantically erroneous descriptions that diverge from original model behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel process translator named BePT (Behavior-based Process Translator) based on the encoder-decoder paradigm, encoding a process model into a middle representation and decoding the representation into NL descriptions. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that BePT satisfies behavior correctness, behavior completeness and description minimality. The qualitative and quantitative experiments show that BePT outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.