Recently, deep learned enabled end-to-end communication systems have been developed to merge all physical layer blocks in the traditional communication systems, which make joint transceiver optimization possible Powered by deep learning, natural language processing has achieved great success in analyzing and understanding a large amount of language texts Inspired by research results in both areas, we aim to provide a new view on communication systems from the semantic level Particularly, we propose a deep learning based semantic communication system, named DeepSC, for text transmission Based on the Transformer, the DeepSC aims at maximizing the system capacity and minimizing the semantic errors by recovering the meaning of sentences, rather than bit- or symbol-errors in traditional communications Moreover, transfer learning is used to ensure the DeepSC applicable to different communication environments and to accelerate the model training process To justify the performance of semantic communications accurately, we also initialize a new metric, named sentence similarity Compared with the traditional communication system without considering semantic information exchange, the proposed DeepSC is more robust to channel variation and is able to achieve better performance, especially in the low signal-to-noise (SNR) regime, as demonstrated by the extensive simulation results

Deep Learning Enabled Semantic Communication Systems

Semantic communications could improve the transmission efficiency significantly by exploring the semantic information. In this paper, we make an effort to recover the transmitted speech signals in the semantic communication systems, which minimizes the error at the semantic level rather than the bit or symbol level. Particularly, we design a deep learning (DL)-enabled semantic communication system for speech signals, named DeepSC-S. In order to improve the recovery accuracy of speech signals, especially for the essential information, DeepSC-S is developed based on an attention mechanism by utilizing a squeeze-and-excitation (SE) network. The motivation behind the attention mechanism is to identify the essential speech information by providing higher weights to them when training the neural network. Moreover, in order to facilitate the proposed DeepSC-S for dynamic channel environments, we find a general model to cope with various channel conditions without retraining. Furthermore, we investigate DeepSC-S in telephone systems as well as multimedia transmission systems to verify the model adaptation in practice. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed DeepSC-S outperforms the traditional communications in both cases in terms of the speech signals metrics, such as signal-to-distortion ration and perceptual evaluation of speech distortion. Besides, DeepSC-S is more robust to channel variations, especially in the low signal-to-noise (SNR) regime.

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Semantic Communication Systems for Speech Transmission

Communication systems to date primarily aim at reliably communicating bit sequences. Such an approach provides efficient engineering designs that are agnostic to the meanings of the messages or to the goal that the message exchange aims to achieve. Next generation systems, however, can be potentially enriched by folding message semantics and goals of communication into their design. Further, these systems can be made cognizant of the context in which communication exchange takes place, thereby providing avenues for novel design insights. This tutorial summarizes the efforts to date, starting from its early adaptations, semantic-aware and task-oriented communications, covering the foundations, algorithms and potential implementations. The focus is on approaches that utilize information theory to provide the foundations, as well as the significant role of learning in semantics and task-aware communications.

Beyond Transmitting Bits: Context, Semantics, and Task-Oriented Communications

To process and transfer large amounts of data in emerging wireless services, it has become increasingly appealing to exploit distributed data communication and learning. Specifically, edge learning (EL) enables local model training on geographically disperse edge nodes and minimizes the need for frequent data exchange. However, the current design of separating EL deployment and communication optimization does not yet reap the promised benefits of distributed signal processing, and sometimes suffers from excessive signalling overhead, long processing delay, and unstable learning convergence. In this paper, we provide an overview on practical distributed EL techniques and their interplay with advanced communication optimization designs. In particular, typical performance metrics for dual-functional learning and communication networks are discussed. Also, recent achievements of enabling techniques for the dual-functional design are surveyed with exemplifications from the mutual perspectives of “communications for learning” and “learning for communications.” The application of EL techniques within a variety of future communication systems are also envisioned for beyond 5G (B5G) wireless networks. For the application in goal-oriented semantic communication, we present a first mathematical model of the goal-oriented source entropy as an optimization problem. In addition, from the viewpoint of information theory, we identify fundamental open problems of characterizing rate regions for communication networks supporting distributed learning-and-computing tasks. We also present technical challenges as well as emerging application opportunities in this field, with the aim of inspiring future research and promoting widespread developments of EL in B5G.

Edge Learning for B5G Networks With Distributed Signal Processing: Semantic Communication, Edge Computing, and Wireless Sensing

Towards Goal-Oriented Semantic Signal Processing: Applications and Future Challenges

We consider a semantic communication system for speech signals, named SCS. Motivated by the breakthroughs in deep learning, we explore the speech semantic to recover semantic meaning of the speech at the receiver, which aims to minimize the speech semantic error rather than the bit-error rate or symbol-error rate in traditional communications. Particularly, based on the attention mechanism squeeze-and-excitation (SE) networks, we design the transceiver as an end-to-end (E2E) system, which extracts and learns the essential speech information. Furthermore, in order to facilitate the E2E speech semantic communication system to work well on various practical communication scenarios, we find a model yielding good performance when coping with various channel environments without retraining process. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed SCS is more robust to channel variations and outperforms traditional communication systems, especially in the low signal-to-noise (SNR) regime.

Semantic Communications for Speech Signals

We consider a semantic communication system for speech signals, named DeepSC-S. Motivated by the breakthroughs in deep learning (DL), we make an effort to recover the transmitted speech signals in the semantic communication systems, which minimizes the error at the semantic level rather than the bit level or symbol level as in the traditional communication systems. Particularly, based on an attention mechanism employing squeeze-and-excitation (SE) networks, we design the transceiver as an end-to-end (E2E) system, which learns and extracts the essential speech information. Furthermore, in order to facilitate the proposed DeepSC-S to work well on dynamic practical communication scenarios, we find a model yielding good performance when coping with various channel environments without retraining process. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed DeepSC-S is more robust to channel variations and outperforms the traditional communication systems, especially in the low signal-to-noise (SNR) regime.

In this paper, we develop a deep learning based semantic communication system for speech transmission, named DeepSC-ST. We take the speech recognition and speech synthesis as the transmission tasks of the communication system, respectively. First, the speech recognition-related semantic features are extracted for transmission by a joint semantic-channel encoder and the text is recovered at the receiver based on the received semantic features, which significantly reduces the required amount of data transmission without performance degradation. Then, we perform speech synthesis at the receiver, which dedicates to re-generate the speech signals by feeding the recognized text and the speaker information into a neural network module. To enable the DeepSC-ST adaptive to dynamic channel environments, we identify a robust model to cope with different channel conditions. According to the simulation results, the proposed DeepSC-ST significantly outperforms conventional communication systems and existing DL-enabled communication systems, especially in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. A software demonstration is further developed as a proof-of-concept of the DeepSC-ST.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ielx7/7693/4656680/10038754.pdf

Zhenzi Weng

Papers

Semantic Communication Systems for Speech Transmission

Semantic Communications for Speech Signals

Semantic Communications for Speech Signals

Deep Learning Enabled Semantic Communications with Speech Recognition and Synthesis

Semantic Communication Systems for Speech Transmission