Author:
Emanuel Diamant
Affiliation:
VIDIA-mant, Israel
Keyword(s):
Information Definition, Information Processing, Computing with Words.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Applications
;
Artificial Intelligence
;
Cognitive Systems
;
Computational Intelligence
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Evolutionary Computing
;
Human-Computer Interaction
;
Intelligent User Interfaces
;
Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
;
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Natural Language Processing
;
Pattern Recognition
;
Soft Computing
;
Symbolic Systems
;
Vision and Perception
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 handl
ing 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.
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