[bagacrap]

They aren't talking about the semantic information of the word "trump". They explain the methodology for calculating information, and it's per syllable (based on the number of distinct syllables that are part of the language's phonetics). So, for English speakers, 'trump' has exactly 7 bits in it. That exact syllable may or may not exist in another language, but if so the same singly syllabic word "trump" would have a different number of bits to a speaker of that language. Maybe next time RTA?

[cortesoft]

In other words, they aren't factoring in compression.

[EpicEng]

>Maybe next time RTA?

I think it's you that has missed the point. Syllables have a very loose correlation to information. So great; we can stream out 39bits worth of syllables / second. In what way does that describe how information dense those syllables are? Context matters here.

[rtkwe]

I think the fact that context matters so much is why we don't try to quantify it. The word 'trump' can covey a lot of meaning or next to nothing, eg in a card game the word trump can covey a lot of information about the state of play and your reaction to it to your competitors. It doesn't take any longer to say and in the context of the game may take less time to think up as well.

[bagacrap]

The researchers are not making any claims wrt semantic information density.

[bagacrap]

s/exactly 7/a little more than 7/