Challenges in legal process discovery

One of the main promises of process conformance is the opportunity to align normative processes (i.e. how the process should behave) and event logs (i.e. how does the process actually behaves). Results of conformance checking are valid as long as normative processes correspond to actual norms. Recent developments advocate the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to process model discovery from texts. We present a series of challenges in textual process discovery that limit its applicability to real norms. The challenges emerges from experiences with legal practitioners in the digitalization of administrative processes in Danish and Italian municipalities, and they need to be solved in order to provide accurate normative processes that reflect the intent of laws.