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PhD Thesis Defense - Yu-Chuan Yen

PhD Thesis Defense - Yu-Chuan Yen

Title: Constructing an unambiguous user-and-machine-friendly, natural-language protocol specification system

Committee Members: Barath Raghavan, Ramesh Govindan, Murali Annavaram

Abstract: Protocol specification has existed for decades to deliver the design and implementation of numerous protocols.
As the guideline and foundation of diverse advanced systems, the methods to process and compose protocol specification have not changed much despite emerging advanced techniques.

The production of specifications remains labor-intensive and involves rigorous discussion to avoid miscommunication via natural language media. A key reason behind these facts is the existence of ambiguities in natural language articles. Ambiguities could represent an unreasonable sentence, a multiple-meaning sentence, or any under-specified behaviors. However, identification of ambiguities is challenging to be applied in domain specific context. In addition, lack of studies applying advanced natural language processing techniques limits our understanding and practices of improving specification production. Motivated by the above observations, this thesis makes the first steps in introducing and building a prototype system that is user-and-machine-friendly and able to process natural language protocol specification while guaranteeing the ambiguous level of the specification. The contributions are four-fold. Firstly, it applies advanced natural language processing techniques called Combinatory Categorial Grammar to analyze protocol specification texts and identifies ambiguous sentences that could result in buggy implementations. Secondly, it parses unambiguous English specification and generates corresponding executable protocol codes that can interoperate with well-known third party code. Thirdly, it defines protocol behaviors with a math definition and introduces unambiguous configurations. The specification configuration is easy for authors to design and easy to automatically generate corresponding English specification and executable code. Lastly, it categorizes a set of verification rules that are able to assist in filtering unreasonable configurations which could not be turned into pieces of English paragraphs or code blocks

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Melissa Ochoa

Event Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/2553045376