Yilin Xiao, Jin Chen, Qinggang Zhang, Yujing Zhang, Chuang Zhou, Longhao Yang, Lingfei Ren, Xin Yang, Xiao Huang. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Nonlinear complex system modeling has drawn attention from diverse fields and many approaches have been developed. Among those approaches, the advantages of the belief rule base (BRB) expert system have been shown for managing multiple types of information under uncertainty and modeling the nonlinearity present in many theoretical and practical complex systems. However, two challenges still need to be addressed. First, BRB needs to be downsized to conserve modeling and computational effort. For this challenge, a new disjunctive assumption is applied, which can significantly downsize BRB while maintaining its completeness. Second, the structure and parameters of BRB need to be jointly optimized. For this challenge, a new Akaike information criterion (AIC)-based optimization objective is derived to represent both modeling accuracy and modeling complexity. Moreover, a joint bi-level optimization model with an AIC-based objective is constructed for the BRB structure and parameters, and a bi-level optimization algorithm is proposed. Three evolutionary algorithms, namely, the genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization algorithm, and differential evolutionary algorithm, are tested in a comparative fashion to determine the best fit for the optimization engine. The results of two practical case studies show that the joint optimization approach can identify an optimal configuration for both its structure and parameters, which is referred to as the best decision structure in this paper.