Conceptual entanglement is a crucial phenomenon in quantum cognition because it implies that classical probabilities cannot model non--compositional conceptual phenomena. While several psychological experiments have been developed to test conceptual entanglement, this has not been explored in the context of Natural Language Processing. In this paper, we apply the hypothesis that words of a document are traces of the concepts that a person has in mind when writing the document. Therefore, if these concepts are entangled, we should be able to observe traces of their entanglement in the documents. In particular, we test conceptual entanglement by contrasting language simulations with results obtained from a text corpus. Our analysis indicates that conceptual entanglement is strongly linked to the way in which language is structured. We discuss the implications of this finding in the context of conceptual modeling and of Natural Language Processing.
Conceptual entanglement is a crucial phenomenon in quantum cognition because it implies that classical probabilities cannot model non--compositional conceptual phenomena. While several psychological experiments have been developed to test conceptual entanglement, this has not been explored in the context of Natural Language Processing. In this paper, we apply the hypothesis that words of a document are traces of the concepts that a person has in mind when writing the document. Therefore, if these concepts are entangled, we should be able to observe traces of their entanglement in the documents. In particular, we test conceptual entanglement by contrasting language simulations with results obtained from a text corpus. Our analysis indicates that conceptual entanglement is strongly linked to the way in which language is structured. We discuss the implications of this finding in the context of conceptual modeling and of Natural Language Processing.
The representation and processing of concepts is one of the hardest challenges in cognitive science. While computer scientists and engineers have focused on developing advances for particular tasks, philosophers and cognitive scientists have focused on elucidating the structural nature of meaning. A remarkable bridge between these two limited-success approaches can be found in behavioral research, since, in a variety of tasks, humans process information at a conceptual level in a way that is incompatible with classical probability and fuzzy set theory. Recently, attempts have been made to use mathematical schemes founded on quantum structures as alternative approaches. For this reason, the application of quantum structures to this type of phenomena has received increasing attention. The quantum approach allows to faithfully model a number of non-classical deviations observed in experimental data. Moreover, it shows that genuine quantum theoretical notions, such as contextuality, superposition, emergence, and entanglement, are powerful epistemic tools to understand and represent cognitive phenomena. In this thesis, we identify the limitations of classical theories to handle some important cognitive tasks, and introduce the fundamentals of the quantum cognitive approach to concepts. Next, we perform a mathematical analysis of current concept combination models and develop an extension that allows for concrete representations of multiple exemplars simultaneously. Our analysis indicates that a superposition of logical reasoning and a specific form of non-logical reasoning, where non-logical reasoning is dominant, allows to faithfully represent the experimental data. Therefore, the non-logical reasoning introduced by this model represents an important but unexplored form of reasoning in humans. In addition, we develop novel experimental methodologies to identify quantum conceptual structures for concept combinations in the context of natural language processing and psychological experiments. Namely, we present a methodology to build entangled concepts represented as sets of words with respect to a corpus of text, and present a computational and psychological methodology to discern if a collection of concepts behaves statistically as a collection of quantum or classical particles. Using both methodologies we have identified a significant presence of quantum conceptual structure in the context of natural language processing and psychological experiments.
The mathematical formalism of quantum theory has been successfully used in human cognition to model decision processes and to deliver representations of human knowledge. As such, quantum cognition inspired tools have improved technologies for Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval. In this paper, we overview the quantum cognition approach developed in our Brussels team during the last two decades, specifically our identification of quantum structures in human concepts and language, and the modeling of data from psychological and corpus-text-based experiments. We discuss our quantum-theoretic framework for concepts and their conjunctions/disjunctions in a Fock-Hilbert space structure, adequately modeling a large amount of data collected on concept combinations. Inspired by this modeling, we put forward elements for a quantum contextual and meaning-based approach to information technologies in which 'entities of meaning' are inversely reconstructed from texts, which are considered as traces of these entities' states.
We show that data collected from corpuses of documents violate the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt version of Bell's inequality (CHSH inequality) and therefore indicate the presence of quantum entanglement in their structure. We obtain this result by considering two concepts and their combination and coincidence operations consisting of searches of co-occurrences of exemplars of these concepts in specific corpuses of documents. Measuring the frequencies of these co-occurrences and calculating the relative frequencies as approximate probabilities entering in the CHSH inequality, we obtain manifest violations of the latter for all considered corpuses of documents. In comparing these violations with those analogously obtained in an earlier work for the same combined concepts in psychological coincidence experiments with human participants, also violating the CHSH inequality, we identify the entanglement as being carried by the meaning connection between the two considered concepts within the combination they form. We explain the stronger violation for the corpuses of documents, as compared to the violation in the psychology experiments, as being due to the superior meaning domain of the human mind and, on the other side, to the latter reaching a broader domain of meaning and being possibly also actively influenced during the experimentation. We mention some of the issues to be analyzed in future work such as the violations of the CHSH inequality being larger than the 'Cirel'son bound' for all of the considered corpuses of documents.
We show that data collected from corpuses of documents violate the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt version of Bell’s inequality (CHSH inequality) and therefore indicate the presence of quantum entanglement in their structure. We obtain this result by considering two concepts and their combination and coincidence operations consisting of searches of co-occurrences of exemplars of these concepts in specific corpuses of documents. Measuring the frequencies of these co-occurrences and calculating the relative frequencies as approximate probabilities entering in the CHSH inequality, we obtain manifest violations of the latter for all considered corpuses of documents. In comparing these violations with those analogously obtained in an earlier work for the same combined concepts in psychological coincidence experiments with human participants, also violating the CHSH inequality, we identify the entanglement as being carried by the meaning connection between the two considered concepts within the combination they form. We explain the stronger violation for the corpuses of documents, as compared to the violation in the psychology experiments, as being due to the superior meaning domain of the human mind and, on the other side, to the latter reaching a broader domain of meaning and being possibly also actively influenced during the experimentation. We mention some of the issues to be analyzed in future work such as the violations of the CHSH inequality being larger than the ‘Cirel’son bound’ for all of the considered corpuses of documents.
The paper presents quantum model of subjective text perception based on binary cognitive distinctions corresponding to words of natural language. The result of perception is quantum cognitive state represented by vector in the qubit Hilbert space. Complex-valued structure of the quantum state space extends the standard vector-based approach to semantics, allowing to account for subjective dimension of human perception in which the result is constrained, but not fully predetermined by input information. In the case of two distinctions, the perception model generates a two-qubit state, entanglement of which quantifies semantic connection between the corresponding words. This two-distinction perception case is realized in the algorithm for detection and measurement of semantic connectivity between pairs of words. The algorithm is experimentally tested with positive results. The developed approach to cognitive modeling unifies neurophysiological, linguistic, and psychological descriptions in a mathematical and conceptual structure of quantum theory, extending horizons of machine intelligence.
We work out a quantum-theoretic model in complex Hilbert space of a recently performed test on co-occurrencies of two concepts and their combination in retrieval processes on specific corpuses of documents. The test violated the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt version of the Bell inequalities ('CHSH inequality'), thus indicating the presence of entanglement between the combined concepts. We make use of a recently elaborated 'entanglement scheme' and represent the collected data in the tensor product of Hilbert spaces of the individual concepts, showing that the identified violation is due to the occurrence of a strong form of entanglement, involving both states and measurements and reflecting the meaning connection between the component concepts. These results provide a significant confirmation of the presence of quantum structures in corpuses of documents, like it is the case for the entanglement identified in human cognition.