A Theory of Semantic Information

Abstract

Short Abstract:The information really useful to humans must be the trinity of its three components, the form termed syntactic information, the meaning termed semantic information, and the utility termed pragmatic information. But the theory of information set up by Shannon in 1948 is a statistical theory of syntactic information. Thus, the trinity of information theories needs be established as urgently as possible. Such a theory of semantic information will be presented in the paper and it will also be proved that it is the semantic information that is the unique representative of the trinity. This is why the title of the paper is set to "a theory of semantic information" without mentioning the pragmatic information. Extended Abstract 1, IntroductionInformation has been recognized as one of the major resources that humans could effectively utilize for raising their standards of living in the age of information. The establishment of the theory of information has thus become one of the most urgent demands from the society.It is well known that the really useful information for humans should be the trinity of its syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information, so as for the users of the information able to know the form, the meaning, and the utility of the information and thus know how to use it.Claude E. Shannon published a paper in 1948 in BSTJ titled with "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" [1] that successfully deals with such issues as the calculation of information amount produced by the source of communication system, the calculation of the information capacity of the channel, the coding and decoding for matching the source and the channel, etc., making the great contributions to communication theory. Considering that all the issues are related to information to some extent, the theory was later renamed as Information Theory.

A Simple Theoretical Model of Importance for Summarization

“…We call semantic unit an atomic piece of information (Zhong, 2017;Cruse, 1986). We note Ω the set of all possible semantic units.…”

“…Alternatively, P X (ω i ) can be seen as the (normalized) likelihood that a text X entails an atomic information ω i (Carnap and Bar-Hillel, 1953). Another interpretation is to view P X (ω i ) as the normalized contribution (utility) of ω i to the overall meaning of X (Zhong, 2017).…”

“…In general, existing semantic information theories either postulate or imply the existence of semantic units (Carnap and Bar-Hillel, 1953;Bao et al, 2011;Zhong, 2017). For example, the Theory of Strongly Semantic Information produced by Floridi (2009) implies the existence of semantic units (called information units in his work).…”

“…This view is compatible with the common distributional embedding representation of texts rendering the presented framework applicable in practice. When applied arXiv:1801.08991v2 [cs.CL] 6 Aug 2019 to semantic symbols, the tools of information theory indirectly operate at the semantic level (Carnap and Bar-Hillel, 1953;Zhong, 2017).…”

Defense Information - Semantic Aspects

“…Ако "a" е име на съществително и "P" е прилагателно, и тогава "Pa" се смята като "a има качеството P", или "a е P". Моделът предложен от Зонг(Zhong, 2017) има пет важни връзки и могат да се генерират няколко предложения в логиката: истина(Pa∨~Pa); лъжа (Pa∧~Pa); неопределено((Pa).След което достигат до крайна формула I (i) = −log2 m(i). В тази теория има два недостатъка: единият е свързан с идеалния модел на езика, койот е много далеч от естествения, реален език; втория-теорията има отношение само към количествени измервания на семантичната информация и не се интересува от есенцията/същността на информация и значението.…”