TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you are given a part of an article. Your task is to generate headline (title) for this text. Preferred headlines are under fifteen words.
PROBLEM: In this paper we explore a symmetry-based search space reduction technique which can speed up optimal pathfinding on undirected uniform-cost grid maps by up to 38 times. Our technique decomposes grid maps into a set of empty rectangles, removing from each rectangle all interior nodes and possibly some from along the perimeter. We then add a series of macro-edges between selected pairs of remaining perimeter nodes to facilitate provably optimal traversal through each rectangle. We also develop a novel online pruning technique to further speed up search. Our algorithm is fast, memory efficient and retains the same optimality and completeness guarantees as searching on an unmodified grid map.

SOLUTION: Symmetry-Based Search Space Reduction For Grid Maps

PROBLEM: Existing methods for dealing with knowledge updates differ greatly depending on the underlying knowledge representation formalism. When Classical Logic is used, updates are typically performed by manipulating the knowledge base on the model-theoretic level. On the opposite side of the spectrum stand the semantics for updating Answer-Set Programs that need to rely on rule syntax. Yet, a unifying perspective that could embrace both these branches of research is of great importance as it enables a deeper understanding of all involved methods and principles and creates room for their cross-fertilisation, ripening and further development. Furthermore, from a more pragmatic viewpoint, such a unification is a necessary step in addressing updates of hybrid knowledge bases consisting of both a classical and a rule component. This paper bridges the seemingly irreconcilable approaches to updates. It introduces a novel monotonic characterisation of rules, dubbed RE-models, and shows it to be a more suitable semantic foundation for rule updates than SE-models. Then it proposes a generic scheme for specifying semantic rule update operators, based on the idea of viewing a program as the set of sets of RE-models of its rules; updates are performed by introducing additional interpretations – exceptions – to the sets of RE-models of rules in the original program. The introduced scheme is then used to define particular rule update operators that are closely related to both classical update principles and traditional approaches to rules updates, enjoying a range of plausible syntactic as well as semantic properties. In addition, these operators serve as a basis for a solution to the long-standing problem of state condensing for two of the foundational rule update semantics, showing how they can be equivalently defined as binary operators on some class of logic programs. Finally, the essence of these ideas is extracted to define an abstract framework for exception-based update operators, viewing a knowledge base as the set of sets of models of its elements. It is shown that the framework can capture a wide range of both modeland formula-based classical update operators, and thus serves as the first firm formal ground connecting classical and rule updates.

SOLUTION: Exception-Based Knowledge Updates

PROBLEM: Slot Filling (SF) aims to extract the values of certain types of attributes (or slots, such as person:cities of residence) for a given entity from a large collection of source documents. In this paper we propose an effective DNN architecture for SF with the following new strategies: (1). Take a regularized dependency graph instead of a raw sentence as input to DNN, to compress the wide contexts between query and candidate filler; (2). Incorporate two attention mechanisms: local attention learned from query and candidate filler, and global attention learned from external knowledge bases, to guide the model to better select indicative contexts to determine slot type. Experiments show that this framework outperforms state-of-the-art on both relation extraction (16% absolute F-score gain) and slot filling validation for each individual system (up to 8.5% absolute Fscore gain).

SOLUTION:
Improving Slot Filling Performance with Attentive Neural Networks on Dependency Structures