Hey network, can you understand me?

In this paper, we introduce Natural Language Processing to network management by leveraging the capabilities of Natural Language Processing tools, such as speech recognition and text parsing, to extract useful information to build network tasks. We propose an intermediate network-agnostic layer that acts as the medium between natural language input (spoken or written) and different network implementations. We have leveraged the programmability that Software Defined Networks (SDN) offers to build a prototype tool that takes natural language text as an input and uses it to build abstract tasks. Such tasks are then passed to a network controller to be performed in real time. To our knowledge, this is the first work that provides such interface between network users (in the form of natural language) and different network systems.