A Difference-of-Convex Programming Approach With Parallel Branch-and-Bound For Sentence Compression Via A Hybrid Extractive Model

Sentence compression is an important problem in natural language processing with wide applications in text summarization, search engine and human-AI interaction system etc. In this paper, we design a hybrid extractive sentence compression model combining a probability language model and a parse tree language model for compressing sentences by guaranteeing the syntax correctness of the compression results. Our compression model is formulated as an integer linear programming problem, which can be rewritten as a Difference-of-Convex (DC) programming problem based on the exact penalty technique. We use a well-known efficient DC algorithm -- DCA to handle the penalized problem for local optimal solutions. Then a hybrid global optimization algorithm combining DCA with a parallel branch-and-bound framework, namely PDCABB, is used for finding global optimal solutions. Numerical results demonstrate that our sentence compression model can provide excellent compression results evaluated by F-score, and indicate that PDCABB is a promising algorithm for solving our sentence compression model.Comment: Full length paper (a short version of this paper for conference proceedings can be found arXiv:1902.07248

Discrete Dynamical System Approaches For Boolean Polynomial Optimization

In this article, we discuss the numerical solution of Boolean polynomial programs by algorithms borrowing from numerical methods for differential equations, namely the Houbolt and Lie schemes, and a Runge-Kutta scheme. We first introduce a quartic penalty functional (of Ginzburg-Landau type) to approximate the Boolean program by a continuous one and prove some convergence results as the penalty parameter $\varepsilon$ converges to $0$. We prove also that, under reasonable assumptions, the distance between local minimizers of the penalized problem and the (finite) set of solutions of the Boolean program is of order $O(\varepsilon)$. Next, we introduce algorithms for the numerical solution of the penalized problem, these algorithms relying on the Houbolt, Lie and Runge-Kutta schemes, classical methods for the numerical solution of ordinary or partial differential equations. We performed numerical experiments to investigate the impact of various parameters on the convergence of the algorithms. Numerical tests on random generated problems show good performances for our approaches. Indeed, our algorithms converge to local minimizers often close to global minimizers of the Boolean program, and the relative approximation error being of order $O(10^{-1})$.Comment: 29 pages, 30 figure

A Difference-of-Convex Cutting Plane Algorithm for Mixed-Binary Linear Program

In this paper, we propose a cutting plane algorithm based on DC (Difference-of-Convex) programming and DC cut for globally solving Mixed-Binary Linear Program (MBLP). We first use a classical DC programming formulation via the exact penalization to formulate MBLP as a DC program, which can be solved by DCA algorithm. Then, we focus on the construction of DC cuts, which serves either as a local cut (namely type-I DC cut) at feasible local minimizer of MBLP, or as a global cut (namely type-II DC cut) at infeasible local minimizer of MBLP if some particular assumptions are verified. Otherwise, the constructibility of DC cut is still unclear, and we propose to use classical global cuts (such as the Lift-and-Project cut) instead. Combining DC cut and classical global cuts, a cutting plane algorithm, namely DCCUT, is established for globally solving MBLP. The convergence theorem of DCCUT is proved. Restarting DCA in DCCUT helps to quickly update the upper bound solution and to introduce more DC cuts for lower bound improvement. A variant of DCCUT by introducing more classical global cuts in each iteration is proposed, and parallel versions of DCCUT and its variant are also designed which use the power of multiple processors for better performance. Numerical simulations of DCCUT type algorithms comparing with the classical cutting plane algorithm using Lift-and-Project cuts are reported. Tests on some specific samples and the MIPLIB 2017 benchmark dataset demonstrate the benefits of DC cut and good performance of DCCUT algorithms.Comment: 31 pages, 4 figure