On Computing Entity Relatedness in Wikipedia, with Applications

Many text mining tasks, such as clustering, classification, retrieval, and named entity linking, benefit from a measure of relatedness between entities in a knowledge graph. We present a thorough study of all entity relatedness measures in recent literature based on Wikipedia as the knowledge graph. To facilitate this study, we introduce a new dataset with human judgments of entity relatedness. No clear dominance is seen between measures based on textual similarity and graph proximity. Some of the better measures involve expensive global graph computations. We propose a new, space-efficient, computationally lightweight, two-stage framework for relatedness computation. In the first stage, a small weighted subgraph is dynamically grown around the two query entities; in the second stage, relatedness is derived based on computations on this subgraph. Our system shows better agreement with human judgment than existing proposals both on the new dataset and on an established one. Our framework also shows improvements with respect to the state-of-the-art on three different extrinsic evaluations in the domains of ranking entity pairs, entity linking, and synonym extraction

Exploring the colour palette of Wasily Kandinsky: The case study of Spitz-Rund (1925)

The study and conservation of a painting by Wasily Kandinsky, titled Spitz-Rund and dated to 1925, was carried out at the Centro per la Conservazione ed il Restauro dei Beni Culturali "La Venaria Reale" 2018 and 2021. This work, owned by the Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of Bergamo (GAMeC), was created with oil paints on cardboard, and later glued onto a wooden support. A first phase of the project entailed a thorough scientific investigation of the artist's materials and techniques by means of a multi-analytical approach, including both non-invasive and micro-invasive techniques. The present contribution discusses some of the most relevant results obtained from scientific analyses on Kandinsky's masterpiece. The painting stratigraphy and colour palette were investigated using multispectral imaging, spot XRF and in situ Raman analyses. Micro-samples were also taken and analysed with FTIR spectroscopy, Py-GC/MS, optical microscopy and SEM-EDX. Additional investigations using MA-XRF provided further insight into the distribution of various chemical elements, proving essential to deepen our knowledge of the painting and to integrate the information obtained from other analytical techniques. The study highlighted several similarities between Spitz-Rund and other Kandinsky's artworks and made it possible to gain a broader understanding of the artist's technique during the Bauhaus period (1922-1933)