Along with the springing up of the semantics-empowered communication (SemCom) research, it is now witnessing an unprecedentedly growing interest towards a wide range of aspects (e.g., theories, applications, metrics and implementations) in both academia and industry. In this work, we primarily aim to provide a comprehensive survey on both the background and research taxonomy, as well as a detailed technical tutorial. Specifically, we start by reviewing the literature and answering the “what” and “why” questions in semantic transmissions. Afterwards, we present the ecosystems of SemCom, including history, theories, metrics, datasets and toolkits, on top of which the taxonomy for research directions is presented. Furthermore, we propose to categorize the critical enabling techniques by explicit and implicit reasoning-based methods, and elaborate on how they evolve and contribute to modern content & channel semantics-empowered communications. Besides reviewing and summarizing the latest efforts in SemCom, we discuss the relations with other communication levels (e.g., conventional communications) from a holistic and unified viewpoint. Subsequently, in order to facilitate future developments and industrial applications, we also highlight advanced practical techniques for boosting semantic accuracy, robustness, and large-scale scalability, just to mention a few. Finally, we discuss the technical challenges that shed light on future research opportunities.

中文翻译：

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语义赋能的通信：教程兼调查

随着语义赋能通信（SemCom）研究的兴起，学术界和工业界对各个方面（例如理论、应用、指标和实现）的兴趣空前增长。在这项工作中，我们的主要目标是提供对背景和研究分类的全面调查，以及详细的技术教程。具体来说，我们首先回顾文献并回答语义传输中的“什么”和“为什么”问题。随后，我们介绍了 SemCom 的生态系统，包括历史、理论、指标、数据集和工具包，并在此基础上介绍了研究方向的分类。此外，我们建议通过基于显式和隐式推理的方法对关键启用技术进行分类，并详细说明它们如何发展并为现代内容和渠道语义授权的通信做出贡献。除了回顾和​​总结SemCom的最新成果外，我们还从整体和统一的角度讨论了与其他通信层面（例如传统通信）的关系。随后，为了促进未来的发展和工业应用，我们还重点介绍了提高语义准确性、鲁棒性和大规模可扩展性的先进实用技术，仅举几例。最后，我们讨论了揭示未来研究机会的技术挑战。