MIT Category Theory Seminar
2020/05/07

©Spifong

Speaker: Bob Coecke
Title: Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP)


Abstract:
Recently we performed quantum natural language processing on an IBM quantum computer [1]. What got us to the point is the observation that quantum theory and natural language are governed by much of the same category-theoretic structure [2]. From a ML perspective, QNLP is arguably the first form of compositional machine learning where composition embodies a fundamental structure of the data involved, and which is moreover also native to the hardware it is implemented on.

The talk requires no background in quantum theory, nor in natural language theory, nor in machine learning. All relevant references are in [1, 2], where there are also the names of the people involved in getting to this point.

[1] B. Coecke, G. De Felice, K. Meichanetzidis & A. Toumi (2020) Quantum Natural Language Processing: We did it! https://medium.com/cambridge-quantum-computing/quantum-natural-language-processing-748d6f27b31d.
[2] B. Coecke (2016) From quantum foundations via natural language meaning to a theory of everything. arXiv:1602.07618.