Automatic Extraction of Emergency Response Process Models From Chinese Plans

Emergency plans can be regarded as the effective guidance of hazard emergency responses, and they include the textual descriptions of emergency response processes in terms of natural language. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically extract emergency response process models from Chinese emergency plans. First, the emergency plan is represented as a text tree according to its layout markups and sentence-sequential relations. Then, process model elements, including four-level response condition formulas, executive roles, response tasks, and flow relations, are identified by rule-based approaches. Finally, an emergency response process tree is generated from both the text tree and extracted process model elements, and is transformed to an emergency response process that is modeled as business process modeling notation. Extensive experiments on real-world emergency plans demonstrate that the proposed approach is capable of extracting emergency response process models that are highly consistent with both the manually extracted models and the textual plans.