🤖 AI Summary
Semantic communication lacks a unified theoretical framework. This work formally defines its fundamental problem and identifies two core challenges: “language utilization” (efficiently leveraging existing linguistic structures) and “language design” (constructing optimal semantic representations).
Method: For language utilization, we establish three pathways—semantic encoding, semantic decoding, and collaborative semantic coding. For language design, we embed it within a joint source-channel coding framework. We introduce the semantic distortion–cost region as a novel performance evaluation paradigm and develop end-to-end semantic distortion metrics alongside a joint optimization theory. Leveraging information theory, rate-distortion analysis, and semantic modeling, we rigorously characterize the achievable performance bounds for all three pathways.
Contribution/Results: This study provides the first systematic theoretical foundation for semantic communication, establishes its fundamental performance limits, and delivers a verifiable design benchmark—enabling principled analysis and optimization of semantic systems.
📝 Abstract
Semantic communication is an emerging research area that has gained a wide range of attention recently. Despite this growing interest, there remains a notable absence of a comprehensive and widely-accepted framework for characterizing semantic communication. This paper introduces a new conceptualization of semantic communication and formulates two fundamental problems, which we term language exploitation and language design. Our contention is that the challenge of language design can be effectively situated within the broader framework of joint source-channel coding theory, underpinned by a comprehensive end-to-end distortion metric. To tackle the language exploitation problem, we put forth three approaches: semantic encoding, semantic decoding, and a synergistic combination of both in the form of combined semantic encoding and decoding. Furthermore, we establish the semantic distortion-cost region as a critical framework for assessing the language exploitation problem. For each of the three proposed approaches, the achievable distortion-cost region is characterized. Overall, this paper aims to shed light on the intricate dynamics of semantic communication, paving the way for a deeper understanding of this evolving field.
