Automatic case acquisition from texts for process-oriented case-based reasoning

This paper introduces a method for the automatic acquisition from free text of a rich case representation for process-oriented case-based reasoning. Case engineering is among the most complicated and costly tasks in implementing a case-based reasoning system. This is especially so for process-oriented case-based reasoning, where more expressive case representations are normally used and, in our opinion, actually required for satisfactory case adaptation. In this context, the ability to acquire cases automatically from procedural texts is a major step forward in order to reason on processes. We therefore detail a methodology that allows for case acquisition from processes described as free text, with special attention given to assembly instruction texts. This methodology extends the techniques we used to extract actions from cooking recipes. We argue that techniques taken from natural language processing are required for this task, and that they give satisfactory results. An evaluation based on our implemented prototype extracting workflows from recipe texts is provided.