Tools for disambiguating RFCs

Abstract

For decades, drafting Internet protocols has taken significant amounts of human supervision due to the fundamental ambiguity of natural language. Given such ambiguity, it is also not surprising that protocol implementations have long exhibited bugs. This pain and overhead can be significantly reduced with the help of natural language processing (NLP). We recently applied NLP to identify ambiguous or under-specified sentences in RFCs, and to generate protocol implementations automatically when the ambiguity is clarified. However this system is far from general or deployable. To further reduce the overhead and errors due to ambiguous sentences, and to improve the generality of this system, much work remains to be done. In this paper, we consider what it would take to produce a fully-general and useful system for easing the natural-language challenges in the RFC process.