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arXiv:1612.06038 · Lecture notes in computer science

Context and Interference Effects in the Combinations of Natural Concepts

Diederik Aerts, Jonito Aerts Arguëlles, Lester Beltran, Isaac Distrito, Massimiliano Sassoli de Bianchi, Sandro Sozzo, Tomás Veloz

Published Jan 1, 2017• 8 citations
arXivHTMLPDF
DOI
10.1007/978-3-319-57837-8_54

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Theories of natural language and concepts have been unable to model the flexibility, creativity, context-dependence, and emergence, exhibited by words, concepts and their combinations. The mathematical formalism of quantum theory has instead been successful in capturing these phenomena such as graded membership, situational meaning, composition of categories, and also more complex decision making situations, which cannot be modeled in traditional probabilistic approaches. We show how a formal quantum approach to concepts and their combinations can provide a powerful extension of prototype theory. We explain how prototypes can interfere in conceptual combinations as a consequence of their contextual interactions, and provide an illustration of this using an intuitive wave-like diagram. This quantum-conceptual approach gives new life to original prototype theory, without however making it a privileged concept theory, as we explain at the end of our paper.
We elaborate a theory for the modeling of concepts using the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics. Concepts are represented by vectors in the complex Hilbert space of quantum mechanics and membership weights of items are modeled by quantum weights calculated following the quantum rules. We apply this theory to model the disjunction of concepts and show that experimental data of membership weights of items with respect to the disjunction of concepts can be modeled accurately. It is the quantum effects of interference and superposition, combined with an effect of context, that are at the origin of the effects of overextension and underextension observed as deviations from a classical use of the disjunction. We put forward a graphical explanation of the effects of overextension and underextension by interpreting the quantum model applied to the modeling of the disjunction of concepts.
We analyze different aspects of our quantum modeling approach of human concepts, and more specifically focus on the quantum effects of contextuality, interference, entanglement and emergence, illustrating how each of them makes its appearance in specific situations of the dynamics of human concepts and their combinations. We point out the relation of our approach, which is based on an ontology of a concept as an entity in a state changing under influence of a context, with the main traditional concept theories, i.e. prototype theory, exemplar theory and theory theory. We ponder about the question why quantum theory performs so well in its modeling of human concepts, and shed light on this question by analyzing the role of complex amplitudes, showing how they allow to describe interference in the statistics of measurement outcomes, while in the traditional theories statistics of outcomes originates in classical probability weights, without the possibility of interference. The relevance of complex numbers, the appearance of entanglement, and the role of Fock space in explaining contextual emergence, all as unique features of the quantum modeling, are explicitly revealed in this paper by analyzing human concepts and their dynamics.