We present a discriminative, largemargin approach to feature-based matching for word alignment. In this framework, pairs of word tokens receive a matching score, which is based on features of that pair, including measures of association between the words, distortion between their positions, similarity of the orthographic form, and so on. Even with only 100 labeled training examples and simple features which incorporate counts from a large unlabeled corpus, we achieve AER performance close to IBM Model 4, in much less time. Including Model 4 predictions as features, we achieve a relative AER reduction of 22 % in over intersected Model 4 alignments. 1

We present decentralized algorithms that compute minimum-cost subgraphs for establishing multicast connections in networks that use coding. These algorithms, coupled with existing decentralized schemes for constructing network codes, constitute a fully decentralized approach for achieving minimum-cost multicast. Our approach is in sharp contrast to the prevailing approach based on approximation algorithms for the directed Steiner tree problem, which is suboptimal and generally assumes centralized computation with full network knowledge. We also give extensions beyond the basic problem of fixed-rate multicast in networks with directed point-to-point links, and consider the problem of minimum-energy multicast in wireless networks as well as the case of a concave utility function at the sender.

We consider the problem of establishing minimum-cost multicast connections over coded packet networks, i.e., packet networks where the contents of outgoing packets are arbitrary, causal functions of the contents of received packets. We consider both wireline and wireless packet networks as well as both static multicast (where membership of the multicast group remains constant for the duration of the connection) and dynamic multicast (where membership of the multicast group changes in time, with nodes joining and leaving the group). For static multicast, we reduce the problem to a polynomial-time solvable optimization problem, ... and we present decentralized algorithms for solving it. These algorithms, when coupled with existing decentralized schemes for constructing network codes, yield a fully decentralized approach for achieving minimum-cost multicast. By contrast, establishing minimum-cost static multicast connections over routed packet networks is a very difficult problem even using centralized computation, except in the special cases of unicast and broadcast connections. For dynamic multicast, we reduce the problem to a dynamic programming problem and apply the theory of dynamic programming to suggest how it may be solved.

We present a simple and scalable algorithm for maximum-margin estimation of structured output models, including an important class of Markov networks and combinatorial models. We formulate the estimation problem as a convex-concave saddle-point problem that allows us to use simple projection methods based on the dual extragradient algorithm (Nesterov, 2003). The projection step can be solved using dynamic programming or combinatorial algorithms for min-cost convex flow, depending on the structure of the problem. We show that this approach provides a memory-efficient alternative to formulations based on reductions to a quadratic program (QP). We analyze the convergence of the method and present experiments on two very different structured prediction tasks: 3D image segmentation and word alignment, illustrating the favorable scaling properties of our algorithm. 1 1.

Abstract. We discuss the student scheduling problem as it generally applies to high-schools in North-America. We show that the problem is NP-hard and discuss various variations to its formulation. We focus on multi-commodity flow problems because there has recently been much work and a number of interesting results on approximates solutions to such problems.

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