Classifying Amharic News Text Using Self-Organizing Maps

The paper addresses using artificial neural networks for classification of Amharic news items. Amharic is the language for countrywide communication in Ethiopia and has its own writing system containing extensive systematic redundancy. It is quite dialectally diversified and probably representative of the languages of a continent that so far has received little attention within the language processing field. The experiments investigated document clustering around user queries using Self-Organizing Maps, an unsupervised learning neural network strategy. The best ANN model showed a precision of 60.0% when trying to cluster unseen data, and a 69.5% precision when trying to classify it

The Family Name as Socio-Cultural Feature and Genetic Metaphor: From Concepts to Methods

A recent workshop entitled The Family Name as Socio-Cultural Feature and Genetic Metaphor: From Concepts to Methods was held in Paris in December 2010, sponsored by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and by the journal Human Biology. This workshop was intended to foster a debate on questions related to the family names and to compare different multidisciplinary approaches involving geneticists, historians, geographers, sociologists and social anthropologists. This collective paper presents a collection of selected communications

Color segmentation and neural networks for automatic graphic relief of the state of conservation of artworks

none5noThis paper proposes a semi-automated methodology based on a sequence of analysis processes performed on multispectral images of artworks and aimed at the extraction of vector maps regarding their state of conservation. The graphic relief of the artwork represents the main instrument of communication and synthesis of information and data acquired on cultural heritage during restoration. Despite the widespread use of informatics tools, currently, these operations are still extremely subjective and require high execution times and costs. In some cases, manual execution is particularly complicated and almost impossible to carry out. The methodology proposed here allows supervised, partial automation of these procedures avoids approximations and drastically reduces the work times, as it makes a vector drawing by extracting the areas directly from the raster images. We propose a procedure for color segmentation based on principal/independent component analysis (PCA/ICA) and SOM neural networks and, as a case study, present the results obtained on a set of multispectral reproductions of a painting on canvas.openAnnamaria Amura, Anna Tonazzini, Emanuele Salerno, Stefano Pagnotta, Vincenzo PalleschiAmura, Annamaria; Tonazzini, Anna; Salerno, Emanuele; Pagnotta, Stefano; Palleschi, Vincenz

Morphological transformation of the old city of Beijing after 1949

The old city of Beijing has been recognized as the greatest masterpiece of urban planning and urban design. However, since 1949 it has experienced extensive and fast constructions and demolitions, a large number of papers argued that physical and social structure of old city of Beijing has been fading away. In order to find a proper way to protect and redevelop the old Beijing city, it could be better to answer the questions that what is the essence of urban morphology of the Old Beijing (the city before 1950s) and further how it has been transformed during last 50 years since 1949. The paper tried to provide a whole spatial morphology of the old city of Beijing and its transformation from the perspective of space syntax, a syntactical and topological approach. Based on which, it argued syntactical representation of the Old Beijing could give the light on the dual spatial structures, both for ceremony and for everyday life. Further, it argued that the transformation of syntactical morphology of the old city of Beijing had been on the way to make the spatial configuration more intelligibility for every day life since 1949. However, the continued large scale regeneration and urban extension have begun to impair the vitality of the old city due to both weakening spatial synergy and damaging compactness

The structure of the Arts & Humanities Citation Index: A mapping on the basis of aggregated citations among 1,157 journals

Using the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) 2008, we apply mapping techniques previously developed for mapping journal structures in the Science and Social Science Citation Indices. Citation relations among the 110,718 records were aggregated at the level of 1,157 journals specific to the A&HCI, and the journal structures are questioned on whether a cognitive structure can be reconstructed and visualized. Both cosine-normalization (bottom up) and factor analysis (top down) suggest a division into approximately twelve subsets. The relations among these subsets are explored using various visualization techniques. However, we were not able to retrieve this structure using the ISI Subject Categories, including the 25 categories which are specific to the A&HCI. We discuss options for validation such as against the categories of the Humanities Indicators of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the panel structure of the European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH), and compare our results with the curriculum organization of the Humanities Section of the College of Letters and Sciences of UCLA as an example of institutional organization