FN ISI Export Format VR 1.0 PT J TI Comparing textual descriptions to process models – The automatic detection of inconsistencies AF van der Aa, Han Leopold, Henrik Reijers, Hajo A. AU van der Aa, Han Leopold, H Reijers, HA SO Information Systems SN 0306-4379 VL 64 BP 447 EP 460 PY 2017 DE Business process management;Business process modeling;Compliance checking;Inconsistency detection;Matching;Natural language processing AB Many organizations maintain textual process descriptions alongside graphical process models. The purpose is to make process information accessible to various stakeholders, including those who are not familiar with reading and interpreting the complex execution logic of process models. Despite this merit, there is a clear risk that model and text become misaligned when changes are not applied to both descriptions consistently. For organizations with hundreds of different processes, the effort required to identify and clear up such conflicts is considerable. To support organizations in keeping their process descriptions consistent, we present an approach to automatically identify inconsistencies between a process model and a corresponding textual description. Our approach detects cases where the two process representations describe activities in different orders and detect process model activities not contained in the textual description. A quantitative evaluation with 53 real-life model-text pairs demonstrates that our approach accurately identifies inconsistencies between model and text. DI 10.1016/j.is.2016.07.010 ER