An Intent-Based Natural Language Interface for Querying Process Execution Data

Process mining techniques allow organizations to discover, monitor and improve their as-is processes by analyzing the process execution data, aka event data, recorded by their information systems. A recurrent task in process mining is querying. Querying allows users to get insights into specific executions of their processes and to retrieve relevant data. Existing process querying techniques require end users to be knowledgeable of the query language and the database schema. However, a key success factor for process analysis is to make querying accessible to business experts who may be inexperienced in database querying. This paper addresses this challenge by proposing a natural language interface (NLI) for querying event data. The interface allows users to formulate their questions in natural language and to automatically translate the questions into a structured query that can be executed over a database. We use graph based storage techniques, namely labeled property graphs, which allow to explicitly model event data relationships. As an executable query language, we use the Cypher language which is widely used for querying property graphs. The approach has been implemented and evaluated using a publicly available event log.