When you Talk about “Information Processing” What Actually Do you have in Mind?

Emanuel Diamant

2013

Abstract

“Information Processing” is a recently launched buzzword whose meaning is vague and obscure even for the majority of its users. The reason for this is the lack of a suitable definition for the term “information”. In my attempt to amend this bizarre situation, I have realized that, following the insights of Kolmogorov’s Complexity theory, information can be defined as a description of structures observable in a given data set. Two types of structures could be easily distinguished in every data set – in this regard, two types of information (information descriptions) should be designated: physical information and semantic information. Kolmogorov’s theory also posits that the information descriptions should be provided as a linguistic text structure. This inevitably leads us to an assertion that information processing has to be seen as a kind of text processing. The idea is not new – inspired by the observation that human information processing is deeply rooted in natural language handling customs, Lotfi Zadeh and his followers have introduced the so-called “Computing With Words” paradigm. Despite of promotional efforts, the idea is not taking off yet. The reason – a lack of a coherent understanding of what should be called “information”, and, as a result, misleading research roadmaps and objectives. I hope my humble attempt to clarify these issues would be helpful in avoiding common traps and pitfalls.

References

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Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Diamant E. (2013). When you Talk about “Information Processing” What Actually Do you have in Mind? . In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART, ISBN 978-989-8565-39-6, pages 238-243. DOI: 10.5220/0004214602380243


in Bibtex Style

@conference{icaart13,
author={Emanuel Diamant},
title={When you Talk about “Information Processing” What Actually Do you have in Mind?},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART,},
year={2013},
pages={238-243},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004214602380243},
isbn={978-989-8565-39-6},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART,
TI - When you Talk about “Information Processing” What Actually Do you have in Mind?
SN - 978-989-8565-39-6
AU - Diamant E.
PY - 2013
SP - 238
EP - 243
DO - 10.5220/0004214602380243