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Main Authors: Sivan, Doron, Tsodyks, Misha
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.12728
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author Sivan, Doron
Tsodyks, Misha
author_facet Sivan, Doron
Tsodyks, Misha
contents In Shannon's seminal paper, entropy of printed English, treated as a stationary stochastic process, was estimated to be roughly 1 bit per character. However, considered as a means of communication, language differs considerably from its printed form: (i) the units of information are not characters or even words but clauses, i.e. shortest meaningful parts of speech; and (ii) what is transmitted is principally the meaning of what is being said or written, while the precise phrasing that was used to communicate the meaning is typically ignored. In this study, we show that one can leverage recently developed large language models to quantify information communicated in meaningful narratives in terms of bits of meaning per clause.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_12728
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Information Theory of Meaningful Communication
Sivan, Doron
Tsodyks, Misha
Computation and Language
Information Theory
In Shannon's seminal paper, entropy of printed English, treated as a stationary stochastic process, was estimated to be roughly 1 bit per character. However, considered as a means of communication, language differs considerably from its printed form: (i) the units of information are not characters or even words but clauses, i.e. shortest meaningful parts of speech; and (ii) what is transmitted is principally the meaning of what is being said or written, while the precise phrasing that was used to communicate the meaning is typically ignored. In this study, we show that one can leverage recently developed large language models to quantify information communicated in meaningful narratives in terms of bits of meaning per clause.
title Information Theory of Meaningful Communication
topic Computation and Language
Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.12728