Automated Analysis with Event Log Enrichment of the European Public Procurement Processes

The length and extension of legal processes are two of the main problems of contemporary justice. Adopting process analysis techniques can serve to understand the course of these processes, to identify bottlenecks, and to propose improvements. This paper showcases an exploration of legal event logs using process mining techniques. First, we discuss the results obtained by applying state-of-the art process discovery techniques to data obtained from public tenders. Then, we show how to use natural language processing to automatically extract events and dates from the texts of the tenders and leverage this information for improving the results of process mining techniques. As a proof-of-concept, we propose a comparison of the French, Spanish, and Italian cases through process discovery based on calls for tenders from the European TED repository.