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.