Semantic Information
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A Semantic Information is an information that carries significance or meaning for a given system or conceptual entity.
- AKA: Meaningful Information, Relevant Information, Functional Information, Pragmatic Information.
- Context:
- It can range from being an Explicit Semantic Information to being a Latent Semantic Information.
- Example(s):
- Counter-Example(s):
- See: Semantic Model, Semantic Information Retrieval System, Semantic Web, Semantic Network, Concept Record Set, Commonsense Knowledge, Distributional Semantic Modeling, Semantic Mediator Hypothesis, Standard Definition of Information, Shannon Information Theory, Pseudo-Information, Mathematical Theory of Communication.
References
2019
- (Floridi, 2019) ⇒ Luciano Floridi (2019). "Semantic Conceptions of Information", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
- QUOTE: Section 1 attempts to draw a map of the main senses in which one may speak of semantic information, and does so by relying on the analysis of the concept of data (depicted in Figure 1 below). Sometimes the several concepts of information organised in the map can be variously coupled together. This should not be taken as necessarily a sign of confusion, for in some philosophers it may be the result of an intentional bridging. The map is not exhaustive and it is there mainly in order to avoid some obvious pitfalls and to narrow the scope of this article, which otherwise could easily turn into a short version of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Its schematism is only a starting point for further research and the reader interested in knowing more may wish to consult Floridi (2011)[1] and Adriaans and van Benthem (2008)[2].
After this initial orientation, Section 2 provides a brief introduction to information theory, that is, to the mathematical theory of communication (MTC). MTC deserves a space of its own because it is the quantitative approach to the analysis of information that has been most influential among several philosophers. It provides the necessary background to understand several contemporary theories of semantic information, especially Bar-Hillel and Carnap (1953) [3], Dretske (1981)[4] ...
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Figure 1: An informational map.
- QUOTE: Section 1 attempts to draw a map of the main senses in which one may speak of semantic information, and does so by relying on the analysis of the concept of data (depicted in Figure 1 below). Sometimes the several concepts of information organised in the map can be variously coupled together. This should not be taken as necessarily a sign of confusion, for in some philosophers it may be the result of an intentional bridging. The map is not exhaustive and it is there mainly in order to avoid some obvious pitfalls and to narrow the scope of this article, which otherwise could easily turn into a short version of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Its schematism is only a starting point for further research and the reader interested in knowing more may wish to consult Floridi (2011)[1] and Adriaans and van Benthem (2008)[2].
- ↑ Floridi, L. 2011, The Philosophy of Information, Oxford; Oxford University Press.
- ↑ Adriaans, P. and van Benthem, J. (ed.), 2008, Handbook of Philosophy of Information, Amsterdam, Oxford: Elsevier.
- ↑ Bar-Hillel, Y. and Carnap, R., 1953, “An Outline of a Theory of Semantic Information”, repr. in Bar-Hillel [1964], pp. 221-74.
- ↑ Dretske, F. I., 1981, Knowledge and the Flow of Information, Oxford: Blackwell; reprinted, Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 1999.
2018
- (Kolchinsky & Wolpert, 2018) ⇒ Artemy Kolchinsky, and David H. Wolpert (2018). "Semantic Information, Autonomous Agency And Non-Equilibrium Statistical Physics". Interface focus, 8(6), 20180041.
- QUOTE: Shannon information theory provides various measures of so-called “syntactic information”, which reflect the amount of statistical correlation between systems. In contrast, the concept of “semantic information” refers to those correlations which carry significance or “meaning” for a given system. Semantic information plays an important role in many fields, including biology, cognitive science, and philosophy, and there has been a long-standing interest in formulating a broadly applicable and formal theory of semantic information. In this paper we introduce such a theory. We define semantic information as the syntactic information that a physical system has about its environment which is causally necessary for the system to maintain its own existence.
2011
- (Carpenter, 2011) ⇒ Shana Carpenter (2011). "Semantic Information Activated During Retrieval Contributes to Later Retention: Support for the Mediator Effectiveness Hypothesis of the Testing Effect". Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 37(6), 1547-1552. DOI:10.1037/a0024140
- QUOTE: Carpenter (2009)[1] proposed that one type of information activated during retrieval might be semantic in nature. For example, the cue Basket: _____ may activate concepts such as “Eggs,” “Flour,” or “Wicker.” If the correct target is eventually retrieved (Bread), there is now a structure of mediating semantic information that links Basket to Bread.
- ↑ Shana Carpenter (2009). "Cue Strength As A Moderator Of The Testing Effect: The Benefits Of Elaborative Retrieval". Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35(6), 1563. DOI:10.1037/a0017021
2009
- (Hu et al., 2009) ⇒ Xiaohua Hu, Xiaodan Zhang, Caimei Lu, E. K. Park, and Xiaohua Zhou. (2009). “Exploiting Wikipedia As External Knowledge for Document Clustering”. In: Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD-2009).
- QUOTE: In traditional text clustering methods, documents are represented as “bags of words” without considering the semantic information of each document.
2006
- (Hassell et al., 2006) ⇒ Joseph Hassell, Boanerges Aleman-Meza, I. Budak Arpinar. (2006). “Ontology-driven Automatic Entity Disambiguation in Unstructured Text.” In: Proceedings of the 5th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2006). doi:10.1007/11926078
- QUOTE: A significant problem with the World Wide Web today is that there is no explicit semantic information about the data and objects being presented in the web pages.
2005
- (Floridi, 2005) ⇒ Luciano Floridi. (2005). "Is Semantic Information Meaningful Data ?". Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70, no. 2
- QUOTE: There is no consensus yet on the definition of semantic information. This paper contributes to the current debate by criticising and revising the Standard Definition of semantic Information (SDI) as meaningful data, in favour of the Dretske-Grice approach: meaningful and well-formed data constitute semantic information only if they also qualify as contingently truthful. After a brief introduction, SDI is criticised for providing necessary but insufficient conditions for the definition of semantic information. SDI is incorrect because truth-values do not supervene on semantic information, and misinformation (that is, false semantic information) is not a type of semantic information, but pseudo-information, that is not semantic information at all.
2004
- (Reynolds et al., 2004) ⇒ Dave Reynolds, Paul Shabajee, and Steve Cayzer. (2004). “Semantic Information Portals”. In: Proceedings of the 13th international World Wide Web conference on Alternate track papers & posters, pp. 290-291. ACM.
1971
- (Shapiro, 1971) ⇒ Stuart C. Shapiro. (1971). “A Net Structure for Semantic Information Storage, Deduction and Retrieval.” In: Proceedings of the Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA, pages 512–523.
- QUOTE: The information that is stored about a conceptual entity is semantic information, in that meaning of a given conceptual entity for a given being is whatever that being can say about the conceptual entity. This includes everything that being can infer from any further piece of in formation about the conceptual entity.
1968
- (Minsky, 1968) ⇒ Marvin Minsky (1968). "Semantic Information Processing". MIT Press.