**1. Introduction**

Semantics, as a facet of human language, has always attracted the attention of notable philosophers and thinkers. Wikipedia relates the first insights into semantic theory to Plato, the great Greek philosopher of the ancient times, somewhere about the end of the 4th century BC (Wikipedia, 2011). Nevertheless, despite the long history of investigations, the notion of semantics remains elusive and enigmatic. Only in the second half of the passed century (and partially on the verge of the current one) some sort of a consensual definition had emerged.

Alfred Tarski defined semantics as "a discipline which, speaking loosely, deals with certain relations between expressions of a language and the objects… 'referred to' by those expressions" (Tarski, 1944).

Jerry Fodor defines semantics as "a part of a grammar of (a) language. In particular, the part of a grammar that is concerned with the relations between symbols in the language and the things in the world that they refer to or are true of" (Fodor, 2007).

In the latest issue of "The Handbook of Computational Linguistics", David Beaver and Joey Frazee give another, slight different, definition of semantics: "Semantics is concerned with meaning: what meanings are, how meanings are assigned to words, phrases and sentences of natural and formal languages, and how meanings can be combined and used for inference and reasoning" (Beaver & Frazee, 2011).

The list of such citations can be extended endlessly. Nevertheless, an important and an interesting point must be mentioned here – the bulk of citations presuppose a tight link between semantics and the language that it is intended to work for. And that is not surprising – language was always seen as an evolutionary feature that has made us human, that is, a thing that has facilitated our ability to interact and cooperate with other conspecies. It is commonly agreed that the spoken language was the first and the ultimate tool that has endowed us (humans) with the ability to communicate, thus enormously improving our chances of survival.

Let Us First Agree on what the Term "Semantics"

research into the subject of our discourse.

**2.1 Visual information, the first steps** 

vision conjectures as the best choice to follow.

high-level or cognitive image processing).

**2. What is information?** 

scholar opinions are.

challenge.

Means: An Unorthodox Approach to an Age-Old Debate 5

you my understanding of their peculiarities, which have been unveiled in course of my

The question "What is information?" is as old and controversial as the question "What is semantics?" I will not bore you with re-examining what the most prominent thinkers of our time have thought and said about the notion of "Information". In the chapter's reference list I provide some examples of their viewpoints (Adams, 2003; Floridi, 2005; Sloman, 2011) with only one and a single purpose in mind – curious readers by themselves would decide how relevant and useful (for our discussion about semantics/information interrelations) these

My personal interaction with information/semantics issues has happened somewhere in the mid-1980s. At that time I was busy with home security and surveillance systems design and development. As known, such systems rely heavily on visual information acquisition and processing. However – What is visual information? – nobody knew then, nobody knows today. But, that has never restrained anybody from trying again and again to meet the

Deprived from a suitable understanding what visual information is, computer vision designers have always tried to find their inspirations in biological vision analogs, especially human vision analogs. Although underlying fundamentals and operational principles of human vision were obscure and vague, still the research in this field was always far more mature and advanced. Therefore the computer vision society has always considered human

A theory of human visual information processing has been established about thirty years ago by the seminal works of David Marr (Marr, 1982), Anne Treisman (Treisman & Gelade, 1980), Irving Biederman (Biederman, 1987) and a large group of their followers. Since then it has become a classical theory, which dominates today all further developments both in human and the computer vision. The theory considers human visual information processing as an interplay of two inversely directed processing streams. One is an unsupervised, bottom-up directed process of initial image information pieces discovery and localization (The so-called low-level image processing). The other is a supervised, top-down directed process, which conveys the rules and the knowledge that guide the linking and binding of these disjoint information pieces into perceptually meaningful image objects (The so-called

While the idea of low-level processing from the very beginning was obvious and intuitively appealing (therefore, even today the mainstream of image processing is occupied mainly with low-level pixel-oriented computations), the essence of high-level processing was always obscure, mysterious, and undefined. The classical paradigm said nothing about the roots of high-level knowledge origination or about the way it has to be incorporated into the introductory low-level processing. Until now, however, the problem was usually bypassed by capitalizing on the expert domain knowledge, adapted to each and every application

But speaking about the spoken language and its role in human communication, we cannot avoid the inevitable, and somewhat provocative, question: "What actually is being communicated?" The first answer which comes to mind is – language. But we have just agreed that language is only a tool that has emerged to reify our ability to communicate.

I will not bother you with rhetorical questions. My answer is simple, fair and square: Semantics – that is what we communicate to our conspecies using the language as a tool for communication.

It is perfectly right to stress that spoken language was the most ancient enabling technology evolutionary evolved for communication purposes. However, in the course of human development other means of communication have gradually emerged – cave paintings, written languages, book-printing and, in more modern times, various electrical (telegraph, telephony) and electronic (radio, television, internet) forms of communication. What were they all intended to communicate?

You will possibly reject my speculations, but I will insist – Semantics that is what we are all communicating! And it does not matter if in our modern age you prefer to call it not "Semantics" but "Information". (I hope my readers would easily agree that 13,900,000 results for a Google inquiry about "information communication" (and 2,720,000 results for "communicating information") are enough convincing to justify the claim that information is the major subject that's being communicated nowadays).

You will possibly remind me that the first attempt to integrate the terms "Semantics" and "Information" was made about 60 years ago by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel and Rudolf Carnap (Bar-Hillel & Carnap, 1952). As to my knowledge, they were the first who coined the term "Semantic Information". They have sincerely believed that such a merging can be possible: "Prevailing theory of communication (or transmission of information) deliberately neglects the semantic aspects of communication, i. e., the meaning of the messages… Instead of dealing with the information carried by letters, sound waves, and the like, we may talk about the information carried by the sentence, 'The sequence of letters (or sound waves, etc.). .. has been transmitted' " (Bar-Hillel & Carnap, 1952).

However, they were not successful in their try to unite the mathematical theory of information and semantics. The mainstream thinking of that time was determined by the famous saying of The Mathematical Theory of Communication fathers (Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver): "These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem… It is important to emphasize, at the start, that we are not concerned with the meaning or the truth of messages; semantics lies outside the scope of mathematical information theory", (Shannon & Weaver, 1949).

I hope my readers are aware that denying any relations between semantics and information was not the most inspiring idea of that time. On the contrary, for many years it has hampered and derailed the process of understanding the elusive nature of them both, semantics and information alike (Two concepts that in course of human history have become the most important features of human's life).

The aim of this chapter was to avoid the historical pitfalls and not to repeat the mistakes and misconceptions so proudly preached by our predecessors. I will try to prove the existence of a firm link between semantics and information and I will make my best trying to share with you my understanding of their peculiarities, which have been unveiled in course of my research into the subject of our discourse.
