Evaluating LLM-Based Process Explanations under Progressive Behavioral-Input Reduction

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate textual explanations of process models discovered from event logs. Producing explanations from large behavioral abstractions (e.g., directly-follows graphs or Petri nets) can be computationally expensive. This paper reports an exploratory evaluation of explanation quality under progressive behavioral-input reduction, where models are discovered from progressively smaller prefixes of a fixed log. Our pipeline (i) discovers models at multiple input sizes, (ii) prompts an LLM to generate explanations, and (iii) uses a second LLM to assess completeness, bottleneck identification, and suggested improvements. On synthetic logs, explanation quality is largely preserved under moderate reduction, indicating a practical cost-quality trade-off. The study is exploratory, as the scores are LLM-based (comparative signals rather than ground truth) and the data are synthetic. The results suggest a path toward more computationally efficient, LLM-assisted process analysis in resource-constrained settings.