Information theory as a measure of information content
Jack Belzer · Journal of the American Society for Information Science · 1973
Abstract In efficient coding, Information‐Communication‐Coding Theory based on probabilities of occurrence assigns short codes to events with little information content and long codes to events with high information content. This provides a direct relationship of code size to amount of information content. Entropies of surrogates such as citations, abstracts, first paragraphs, last paragraphs, and first and last paragraphs are measures of how well each class of surrogates predicts the relevancy of documents. They are measures of meaningful information in the text of surrogates. Such measures of information are important to information system designers.