From Quantum Picturalism to Quantum NLP: Interpretable, Scalable, and Exponential Advantage

About this session

Quantum and natural language share the same structure! Here's the story. Over some 20 years we have developed a diagrammatic quantum formalism, referred to as quantum picturalism [1, 2]. We showed that this formalism enabled secondary school students to perform exceptionally well on an Oxford University post-grad quantum exam [3]. This quest started when in 1935 John von Neumann denounced `his own’ Hilbert space based quantum formalism. Quantum picturalism on the other hand, is now widespread in quantum technology research.A remarkable fact is that in its pictorial form, composition of quantum systems shares the same structure as natural language. This resulted in the birth of Quantum NLP [4]. In more recent work, we demonstrated exponential advantage, interpretability, and scalability of Quantum NLP [5]. In fact, interpretability and scalability can also be achieved when adopting a quantum-inspired approach on classical hardware.The same formalism has also been used the generate the 1st piece of music with a quantum computer [5].MEDIA REFERENCES:[1] Bob Coecke and Aleks Kissinger (2017) Picturing Quantum Processes.  Cambridge University Press.[2] Bob Coecke and Stefano Gogioso (2022) Quantum in Pictures. Quantinuum.[3] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/dec/16/physicist-bob-coecke-its-easier-to-convince-kids-than-adults-about-quantum-mechanics[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2021/10/13/cambridge-quantum-makes-quantum-natural-language-processing-a-reality/[5] https://thequantuminsider.com/2024/09/18/quantinuum-unveils-first-contribution-toward-responsible-ai-uniting-power-of-its-quantum-processors-with-experimental-work-on-integrating-classical-quantum-computing/[6] https://qspace.fqxi.org/articles/264/quanthovens-fifth