Semantic Communication as a Signaling Game with Correlated Knowledge Bases

TL;DR

This paper models semantic communication as a signaling game with correlated knowledge bases, highlighting the importance of mutual information between knowledge bases for improving communication effectiveness.

Contribution

It introduces a semantic communication model based on signaling games and emphasizes the role of correlated knowledge bases in enhancing performance.

Findings

Conditional mutual information between knowledge bases improves communication performance

Modeling SC as a signaling game provides new insights into information transfer

Performance characterized in terms of mutual information

Abstract

Semantic communication (SC) goes beyond technical communication in which a given sequence of bits or symbols, often referred to as information, is be transmitted reliably over a noisy channel, regardless of its meaning. In SC, conveying the meaning of information becomes important, which requires some sort of agreement between a sender and a receiver through their knowledge bases. In this sense, SC is closely related to a signaling game where a sender takes an action to send a signal that conveys information to a receiver, while the receiver can interpret the signal and choose a response accordingly. Based on the signaling game, we can build a SC model and characterize the performance in terms of mutual information in this paper. In addition, we show that the conditional mutual information between the instances of the knowledge bases of communicating parties plays a crucial role in improving the performance of SC.