Identification of Regulatory Requirements Relevant to Business Processes: A Comparative Study on Generative AI, Embedding-based Ranking, Crowd and Expert-driven Methods

TL;DR

This study compares NLP, generative AI, crowdsourcing, and manual methods for identifying relevant regulatory requirements in business processes, aiming to assist experts and improve efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a comparative evaluation of multiple methods for regulatory requirement identification, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses in different scenarios.

Findings

Embedding-based NLP ranking performs well in automation and transparency.

GPT-4 generative AI shows potential but has limitations in reproducibility.

Crowdsourcing offers a balance between automation and expert insight.

Abstract

Organizations face the challenge of ensuring compliance with an increasing amount of requirements from various regulatory documents. Which requirements are relevant depends on aspects such as the geographic location of the organization, its domain, size, and business processes. Considering these contextual factors, as a first step, relevant documents (e.g., laws, regulations, directives, policies) are identified, followed by a more detailed analysis of which parts of the identified documents are relevant for which step of a given business process. Nowadays the identification of regulatory requirements relevant to business processes is mostly done manually by domain and legal experts, posing a tremendous effort on them, especially for a large number of regulatory documents which might frequently change. Hence, this work examines how legal and domain experts can be assisted in the assessment of relevant requirements. For this, we compare an embedding-based NLP ranking method, a generative AI method using GPT-4, and a crowdsourced method with the purely manual method of creating relevancy labels by experts. The proposed methods are evaluated based on two case studies: an Australian insurance case created with domain experts and a global banking use case, adapted from SAP Signavio's workflow example of an international guideline. A gold standard is created for both BPMN2.0 processes and matched to real-world textual requirements from multiple regulatory documents. The evaluation and discussion provide insights into strengths and weaknesses of each method regarding applicability, automation, transparency, and reproducibility and provide guidelines on which method combinations will maximize benefits for given characteristics such as process usage, impact, and dynamics of an application scenario.