sument

Sument is a hypothetical unit of semantic content used in discussions of language meaning and communication. It is intended to quantify the amount of meaning a linguistic expression conveys within a given context, analogous in purpose to the bit in information theory but focused on meaning rather than data uncertainty.

The term is a neologism formed from semantic and ment (a common suffix in theoretical terms), and it is not tied to a single established framework. In thought experiments and speculative papers, suments are inferred rather than directly measured, by combining linguistic judgments, semantic models, and corpus-based statistics.

Key properties attributed to sument analyses include context dependence, non-observability as a direct measurement, and potential for both additive and non-additive behavior depending on the model. Suments aim to separate content (what is conveyed) from form (how it is said) and to capture variations in meaning across contexts, speakers, and genres.

Applications include theoretical comparisons of communication efficiency, evaluation of semantic content in natural language processing, and the design of compact representations of meaning for tasks such as summarization or translation. Critics note that the lack of standard definition and measurement makes suments a speculative construct.

See also: information content, semantic similarity, semantic feature, sense, referent, NLP evaluation metrics.