Chapter 29: Semantic and Goal-Oriented Communication

Learning Objectives

• Distinguish between Shannon's classical communication framework and semantic/goal-oriented communication
• Formulate the rate-utility tradeoff and relate it to rate-distortion theory with task-specific distortion
• Analyze deep joint source-channel coding and identify when it outperforms the separation architecture
• Define and compare semantic similarity metrics with classical distortion measures
• Evaluate the potential and limitations of semantic communication for next-generation systems
• Connect the information bottleneck to semantic encoder/decoder design