Automatic business process model translation with BPMT

Abstract

Nowadays, many enterprises use business process models for documenting and supporting their operations. As many enterprises have branches in several countries and provide similar services throughout the globe, there is high potential for re-using these process models. However, the language barrier is a major obstacle for the successful re-use of process models, especially in multi-national companies. In this paper, we address this problem by presenting the Business Process Model Translator (BPMT), a technique for the automated translation of business process models that eases the re-use of business process models and reduces redundant work in multi-national companies. It builds upon the state-of-the-art machine translation system Moses and extends it with word and translation disambiguation considering the context of the domain. As a result, the BPMT can successfully deal with the compact and special language fragments that are typically found in business process models. A two-fold evaluation with the BLEU metric and an expert survey showed improvements of our approach over Moses. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.