SNAP: Semantic Stories for Next Activity Prediction

Abstract Predicting the next activity in an ongoing process is one of the most common tasks in the business process management (BPM) domain. It allows businesses to optimize resource allocation, enhance operational efficiency, and aid both in risk mitigation and strategic decision-making. Existing state-of-the-art AI models for BPM do not fully capitalize on available semantic information within process event logs. As current advanced AI-BPM systems provide semantically richer textual data, the need for new adequate models grows. To address this gap, we develop SNAP—a novel system that utilizes LLMs by constructing narratives and semantic contextual stories for historical event logs, which are then used to generate precise and actionable predictions for the ongoing process. SNAP was evaluated on six benchmark datasets, where it demonstrated significant performance improvements over eleven SOTA models, particularly on datasets with high levels of semantic content. This work showcases the potential of integrating LLMs in BPM and outlines a clear path toward future deployment, emphasizing the relevance and innovation of our approach within the broader AI application landscape.