Note on third-order boundary value problem for differential equations with deviating arguments
A third-order boundary value problem for differential equations with deviating arguments is considered in this note. An existence result is obtained by the help of the well-known Leray-Schauder Alternative. Also, a uniqueness result is given.

title: Positive solutions of three-point boundary value problems for the one-dimensional p-laplacian with infinitely many singularities
abstract: We consider thesingular three-point boundary value problems 
(φp(y′))′ + a(t)f(y(t)) = 0, 0 < t < 1, y′(0) = 0, y(1) = βy(ƞ), 
where φp(s) = |s|p−2s, p ≥ 2, 0 < β < 1, 0 < η < 1, f ϵ C([0, + ∞), [0, + ∞)), a: [0,1] → [0, + ∞), andhas countably many singularities in [0, frsol|1/2). We show that there exist countably many positive solutions by using the fixed-point index theory.

title: Mining Comparative Sentences and Relations
abstract: This paper studies a text mining problem, comparative sentence mining (CSM). A comparative sentence expresses an ordering relation between two sets of entities with respect to some common features. For example, the comparative sentence "Canon's optics are better than those of Sony and Nikon" expresses the comparative relation: (better, {optics}, {Canon}, {Sony, Nikon}). Given a set of evaluative texts on the Web, e.g., reviews, forum postings, and news articles, the task of comparative sentence mining is (1) to identify comparative sentences from the texts and (2) to extract comparative relations from the identified comparative sentences. This problem has many applications. For example, a product manufacturer wants to know customer opinions of its products in comparison with those of its competitors. In this paper, we propose two novel techniques based on two new types of sequential rules to perform the tasks. Experimental evaluation has been conducted using different types of evaluative texts from the Web. Results show that our techniques are very promising.

title: Improved Differential Evolution with Dynamic Population Size
abstract: As a novel evolutionary computing technique, recently Differential Evolution (DE) has attracted much attention and wide applications due to its simple concept and easy implementation. However, all the control parameters of the classic DE (crossover rate, scaling factor, and population size) keep fixed during the searching process. To improve the performance of DE, an improved DE (IDE) with dynamic population size is proposed in this paper. Simulation results and comparisons based on some well-known benchmarks and an IIR design problem show the good efficiency of the proposed IDE.

title: Entity discovery and assignment for opinion mining applications
abstract: Opinion mining became an important topic of study in recent years due to its wide range of applications. There are also many companies offering opinion mining services. One problem that has not been studied so far is the assignment of entities that have been talked about in each sentence. Let us use forum discussions about products as an example to make the problem concrete. In a typical discussion post, the author may give opinions on multiple products and also compare them. The issue is how to detect what products have been talked about in each sentence. If the sentence contains the product names, they need to be identified. We call this problem entity discovery. If the product names are not explicitly mentioned in the sentence but are implied due to the use of pronouns and language conventions, we need to infer the products. We call this problem entity assignment. These problems are important because without knowing what products each sentence talks about the opinion mined from the sentence is of little use. In this paper, we study these problems and propose two effective methods to solve the problems. Entity discovery is based on pattern discovery and entity assignment is based on mining of comparative sentences. Experimental results using a large number of forum posts demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique. Our system has also been successfully tested in a commercial setting.

title: Constrained Nonlinear State Estimation - A Differential Evolution Based Moving Horizon Approach
abstract: A solution is proposed to estimate the states in the nonlinear discrete time system. Moving Horizon Estimation (MHE) is used to obtain the approximated states by minimizing a criterion that is the Euclidean form of the difference between the estimated outputs and the measured ones over a finite time horizon. The differential evolution (DE) algorithm is incorporated into the implementation of MHE in order to solve the optimization problem which is presented as a nonlinear programming problem due to the constraints. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated in simulated systems that have appeared in the moving horizon estimation literature.

title: Identifying comparative sentences in text documents
abstract: This paper studies the problem of identifying comparative sentences in text documents. The problem is related to but quite different from sentiment/opinion sentence identification or classification. Sentiment classification studies the problem of classifying a document or a sentence based on the subjective opinion of the author. An important application area of sentiment/opinion identification is business intelligence as a product manufacturer always wants to know consumers' opinions on its products. Comparisons on the other hand can be subjective or objective. Furthermore, a comparison is not concerned with an object in isolation. Instead, it compares the object with others. An example opinion sentence is "the sound quality of CD player X is poor". An example comparative sentence is "the sound quality of CD player X is not as good as that of CD player Y". Clearly, these two sentences give different information. Their language constructs are quite different too. Identifying comparative sentences is also useful in practice because direct comparisons are perhaps one of the most convincing ways of evaluation, which may even be more important than opinions on each individual object. This paper proposes to study the comparative sentence identification problem. It first categorizes comparative sentences into different types, and then presents a novel integrated pattern discovery and supervised learning approach to identifying comparative sentences from text documents. Experiment results using three types of documents, news articles, consumer reviews of products, and Internet forum postings, show a precision of 79% and recall of 81%. More detailed results are given in the paper.