---
title: "Business as Rulesual — paper by Yang et al. (2026)"
description: "To address it, they build BREX (Business Rule Extraction Benchmark) from real-world documents in more than 30 domains… 21 references."
authors: ["Chen Yang", "Ruping Xu", "Ruizhe Li", "Bin Cao", "Jing Fan"]
year: 2026
venue: "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1625/"
doi: "10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.1625"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/yang-2026-business-as-rulesual-benchmark-framework/"
---
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# Business as Rulesual: A Benchmark and Framework for Business Rule Flow Modeling with LLMs

**Authors:** [Chen Yang](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/chen-yang/), Ruping Xu, [Ruizhe Li](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/ruizhe-li/), Bin Cao and [Jing Fan](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/jing-fan/) · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/acl/) ([ACL 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/acl/2026/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1625/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1625.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.1625](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.1625) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4416557462)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
The paper tackles turning unstructured business documents, such as regulations, manuals, and compliance guides, into structured rule flows that machines can execute. Earlier procedural-extraction work mostly models linear action sequences like recipes. It misses the conditional branching and parallel requirements common in regulatory texts, a mismatch the authors call the "Logic Gap". To address it, they build BREX (Business Rule Extraction Benchmark) from real-world documents in more than 30 domains, with a small, expert-revised share of synthetic text. Each rule is an atomic condition–action pair, and rules are linked through Sequential, Conditional, or Parallel dependencies. The authors also propose ExIde, a prompt-only framework that needs no fine-tuning. It compares five prompting strategies, from implicit semantic alignment to pseudo-code generation, and is tested on 13 LLMs. Generating executable pseudo-code beats standard prompts, and reasoning-optimized models track long-range, non-linear dependencies better than instruction-tuned ones. This matters for process automation where privacy or cost rules out custom training.

## Key points
- BREX contains 409 documents and 2,855 expert-annotated rules, about 7 rules per document. Over 30% of rules take part in conditional or parallel relations.
- A condition is encoded as a ⟨Slot Type, Logical Operator, Reference Value⟩ triple paired with an action. Three experts annotated the data, and three more verified it, with agreement measured by ICC and Kappa.
- Gemini 2.5 Pro generated synthetic texts only to fill gaps in rare structures such as nested conditions and parallel constraints. Experts filtered and revised all of them.
- Stated limitations:
  - Pairwise dependency checking grows quadratically with the number of rules.
  - The schema does not cover temporal constraints, exceptions, or probabilistic rules.
- Code and data are released at github.com/oYoungCo/Business-as-Rulesual (ACL 2026).

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [University of Aberdeen](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-aberdeen/) — University, Aberdeen, United Kingdom · 23 works · 1,583 citations
- [University of Birmingham](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-birmingham/) — University, Birmingham, United Kingdom · 27 works · 62,564 citations
- [Zhejiang University of Technology](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/zhejiang-university-of-technology/) — University, Hangzhou, China · 8 works · 98 citations

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## Cite

Cite as: Chen Yang, Ruping Xu, Ruizhe Li, Bin Cao and Jing Fan. 2026. Business as Rulesual: A Benchmark and Framework for Business Rule Flow Modeling with LLMs. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{yang2026business,
  title = {{Business as Rulesual: A Benchmark and Framework for Business Rule Flow Modeling with LLMs}},
  author = {Chen Yang, Ruping Xu, Ruizhe Li, Bin Cao and Jing Fan},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.1625},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.1625}
}
```

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*Updated 2 November 2026*