Empowering IETF Collaboration with NLP Search Innovations and LLM-Enhanced RFC Writing

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) produces extensive textual data, including discussions in email archives and GitHub repositories and Internet-Drafts (I-Ds), which are preliminary versions of Requests for Comments (RFCs). The sheer volume and complexity of this material present significant workflow challenges, contributing to the duration of the standardization process (it is common to take several years from an initial draft to the final RFC). This paper explores the potential of Natural Language Processing (NLP) using Large Language Models (LLMs) to streamline IETF workflows. We use Information Retrieval (IR) to i) build a search system that helps users locate comments related to details in an I-D, and ii) partially automate RFC writing.