A natural language querying interface for process mining

In spite of recent advances in process mining, making this new technology accessible to non-technical users remains a challenge. Process maps and dashboards still seem to frighten many line of business professionals. In order to democratize this technology, we propose a natural language querying interface that allows non-technical users to retrieve relevant information and insights about their processes by simply asking questions in plain English. In this work we propose a reference architecture to support questions in natural language and provide the right answers by integrating 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 and an implementation of the architecture that interfaces to an existing commercial tool: Everflow. We also introduce a taxonomy for process mining related questions, and use that as a background grid to analyze the performance of this experiment. Finally, we point to potential future work opportunities in this field.

Automated summary

Despite recent advances in process mining, making it accessible to non-technical users remains a challenge. To democratize this technology, a natural language querying interface is proposed to allow users to retrieve relevant information and insights about their processes by asking questions in plain English. A reference architecture is proposed to support natural language questions and provide the right answers by integrating with existing process mining tools.