Just Tell Me: Prompt Engineering in Business Process Management
This is an incremental position paper that identifies opportunities for applying prompt engineering in BPM research.
The paper argues that prompt engineering can enable the use of pre-trained language models in business process management without fine-tuning, and proposes a research agenda to explore its potentials and challenges.
GPT-3 and several other language models (LMs) can effectively address various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including machine translation and text summarization. Recently, they have also been successfully employed in the business process management (BPM) domain, e.g., for predictive process monitoring and process extraction from text. This, however, typically requires fine-tuning the employed LM, which, among others, necessitates large amounts of suitable training data. A possible solution to this problem is the use of prompt engineering, which leverages pre-trained LMs without fine-tuning them. Recognizing this, we argue that prompt engineering can help bring the capabilities of LMs to BPM research. We use this position paper to develop a research agenda for the use of prompt engineering for BPM research by identifying the associated potentials and challenges.