1,858 research outputs found
If the Current Clique Algorithms are Optimal, so is Valiant's Parser
The CFG recognition problem is: given a context-free grammar
and a string of length , decide if can be obtained from
. This is the most basic parsing question and is a core computer
science problem. Valiant's parser from 1975 solves the problem in
time, where is the matrix multiplication
exponent. Dozens of parsing algorithms have been proposed over the years, yet
Valiant's upper bound remains unbeaten. The best combinatorial algorithms have
mildly subcubic complexity.
Lee (JACM'01) provided evidence that fast matrix multiplication is needed for
CFG parsing, and that very efficient and practical algorithms might be hard or
even impossible to obtain. Lee showed that any algorithm for a more general
parsing problem with running time can
be converted into a surprising subcubic algorithm for Boolean Matrix
Multiplication. Unfortunately, Lee's hardness result required that the grammar
size be . Nothing was known for the more relevant
case of constant size grammars.
In this work, we prove that any improvement on Valiant's algorithm, even for
constant size grammars, either in terms of runtime or by avoiding the
inefficiencies of fast matrix multiplication, would imply a breakthrough
algorithm for the -Clique problem: given a graph on nodes, decide if
there are that form a clique.
Besides classifying the complexity of a fundamental problem, our reduction
has led us to similar lower bounds for more modern and well-studied cubic time
problems for which faster algorithms are highly desirable in practice: RNA
Folding, a central problem in computational biology, and Dyck Language Edit
Distance, answering an open question of Saha (FOCS'14)
Convex Graph Invariant Relaxations For Graph Edit Distance
The edit distance between two graphs is a widely used measure of similarity
that evaluates the smallest number of vertex and edge deletions/insertions
required to transform one graph to another. It is NP-hard to compute in
general, and a large number of heuristics have been proposed for approximating
this quantity. With few exceptions, these methods generally provide upper
bounds on the edit distance between two graphs. In this paper, we propose a new
family of computationally tractable convex relaxations for obtaining lower
bounds on graph edit distance. These relaxations can be tailored to the
structural properties of the particular graphs via convex graph invariants.
Specific examples that we highlight in this paper include constraints on the
graph spectrum as well as (tractable approximations of) the stability number
and the maximum-cut values of graphs. We prove under suitable conditions that
our relaxations are tight (i.e., exactly compute the graph edit distance) when
one of the graphs consists of few eigenvalues. We also validate the utility of
our framework on synthetic problems as well as real applications involving
molecular structure comparison problems in chemistry.Comment: 27 pages, 7 figure
Approximating Language Edit Distance Beyond Fast Matrix Multiplication: Ultralinear Grammars Are Where Parsing Becomes Hard!
In 1975, a breakthrough result of L. Valiant showed that parsing context free grammars can be reduced to Boolean matrix multiplication, resulting in a running time of O(n^omega) for parsing where omega <= 2.373 is the exponent of fast matrix multiplication, and n is the string length. Recently, Abboud, Backurs and V. Williams (FOCS 2015) demonstrated that this is likely optimal; moreover, a combinatorial o(n^3) algorithm is unlikely to exist for the general parsing problem. The language edit distance problem is a significant generalization of the parsing problem, which computes the minimum edit distance of a given string (using insertions, deletions, and substitutions) to any valid string in the language, and has received significant attention both in theory and practice since the seminal work of Aho and Peterson in 1972. Clearly, the lower bound for parsing rules out any algorithm running in o(n^omega) time that can return a nontrivial multiplicative approximation of the language edit distance problem. Furthermore, combinatorial algorithms with cubic running time or algorithms that use fast matrix multiplication are often not desirable in practice.
To break this n^omega hardness barrier, in this paper we study additive approximation algorithms for language edit distance. We provide two explicit combinatorial algorithms to obtain a string with minimum edit distance with performance dependencies on either the number of non-linear productions, k^*, or the number of nested non-linear production, k, used in the optimal derivation. Explicitly, we give an additive O(k^*gamma) approximation in time O(|G|(n^2 + (n/gamma)^3)) and an additive O(k gamma) approximation in time O(|G|(n^2 + (n^3/gamma^2))), where |G| is the grammar size and n is the string length. In particular, we obtain tight approximations for an important subclass of context free grammars known as ultralinear grammars, for which k and k^* are naturally bounded. Interestingly, we show that the same conditional lower bound for parsing context free grammars holds for the class of ultralinear grammars as well, clearly marking the boundary where parsing becomes hard
EmbAssi: Embedding Assignment Costs for Similarity Search in Large Graph Databases
The graph edit distance is an intuitive measure to quantify the dissimilarity
of graphs, but its computation is NP-hard and challenging in practice. We
introduce methods for answering nearest neighbor and range queries regarding
this distance efficiently for large databases with up to millions of graphs. We
build on the filter-verification paradigm, where lower and upper bounds are
used to reduce the number of exact computations of the graph edit distance.
Highly effective bounds for this involve solving a linear assignment problem
for each graph in the database, which is prohibitive in massive datasets.
Index-based approaches typically provide only weak bounds leading to high
computational costs verification. In this work, we derive novel lower bounds
for efficient filtering from restricted assignment problems, where the cost
function is a tree metric. This special case allows embedding the costs of
optimal assignments isometrically into space, rendering efficient
indexing possible. We propose several lower bounds of the graph edit distance
obtained from tree metrics reflecting the edit costs, which are combined for
effective filtering. Our method termed EmbAssi can be integrated into existing
filter-verification pipelines as a fast and effective pre-filtering step.
Empirically we show that for many real-world graphs our lower bounds are
already close to the exact graph edit distance, while our index construction
and search scales to very large databases
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