Mining Business Policy Texts for Discovering Process Models: A Framework and Some Initial Results

Many organizations use digitized policy manuals to help govern their business operations. However, many business processes are often not synchronized in a timely manner with the business policies because of the high costs of redesigning business process models in the face of frequent policy changes. As such, there is a great need for more efficient ways to maintaining the alignment between business policies and processes. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that will help process designers extract process models out of policy manuals using information retrieval techniques; we refer to our approach as Policy Based Process Mining (PBPM). PBPM can help organizations better understand their business processes by analyzing and visualizing their existing policies. In this paper, we present the PBPM framework and validate the first step of the framework by identifying process-related business policies automatically. Our initial experiments using bag-of-words and tree kernel techniques produced very promising results.