The emerging classical-quantum transfer learning paradigm has brought a decent performance to quantum computational models in many tasks, such as computer vision, by enabling a combination of quantum models and classical pre-trained neural networks. However, using quantum computing with pre-trained models has yet to be explored in natural language processing (NLP). Due to the high linearity constraints of the underlying quantum computing infrastructures, existing Quantum NLP models are limited in performance on real tasks. We fill this gap by pre-training a sentence state with complex-valued BERT-like architecture, and adapting it to the classical-quantum transfer learning scheme for sentence classification. On quantum simulation experiments, the pre-trained representation can bring 50\% to 60\% increases to the capacity of end-to-end quantum models.
The emerging classical-quantum transfer learning paradigm has brought a decent performance to quantum computational models in many tasks, such as computer vision, by enabling a combination of quantum models and classical pre-trained neural networks. However, using quantum computing with pre-trained models has yet to be explored in natural language processing (NLP). Due to the high linearity constraints of the underlying quantum computing infrastructures, existing Quantum NLP models are limited in performance on real tasks. We fill this gap by pre-training a sentence state with complex-valued BERT-like architecture, and adapting it to the classical-quantum transfer learning scheme for sentence classification. On quantum simulation experiments, the pre-trained representation can bring 50% to 60% increases to the capacity of end-to-end quantum models.
Quantum computing models have propelled advances in many application domains. However, in the field of natural language processing (NLP), quantum computing models are limited in representation capacity due to the high linearity of the underlying quantum computing architecture. This work attempts to address this limitation by leveraging the concept of self-supervised pre-training, a paradigm that has been propelling the rocketing development of NLP, to increase the power of quantum NLP models on the representation level. Specifically, we present a self-supervised pre-training approach to train quantum encodings of sentences, and fine-tune quantum circuits for downstream tasks on its basis. Experiments show that pre-trained mechanism brings remarkable improvement over end-to-end pure quantum models, yielding meaningful prediction results on a variety of downstream text classification datasets.
Abstract Quantum Machine Learning (QML) is a promising field that combines the power of quantum computing with machine learning. Variational quantum circuits, where parameters of circuits are learned classically, have been widely used in many recent applications of QML. This is an instance of a hybrid quantum-classical framework, where both classical and quantum components are present. However, applying these techniques to applications involving massive data is a challenging task. One way to overcome this, is using the concept of classical-quantum transfer learning with the help of dressed quantum circuit, introduced recently, where the underlying neural architecture is pre-trained classically, but at the final steps (decision layer), a quantum circuit is used, followed by quantum measurements and post-processing to classify images with high precision. In this paper, we applied hybrid classical-quantum transfer learning to another task of massive data processing, i.e. Natural Language Processing (NLP). We show how to (binary) classify short texts (e.g., SMS) with classical-quantum transfer learning, which was originally applied to image processing only. Our quantum network was pre-trained by Bidirectional Encoder Representations from the Transformers (BERT) model, and its variational quantum circuit is fine-tuned for text processing. We evaluated the performance of our hybrid neural architecture using the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve, which is typically used in the evaluation of classification problems. The results indicate high precision as well as lower loss function. To our knowledge, our work is the first application of quantum transfer learning to the area of NLP. Finally a comparison with a tool that uses learning but in a different way than transfer learning is presented
In recent developments, deep learning methodologies applied to Natural Language Processing (NLP) have revealed a paradox: They improve performance but demand considerable data and resources for their training. Alternatively, quantum computing exploits the principles of quantum mechanics to overcome the computational limitations of current methodologies, thereby establishing an emerging field known as quantum natural language processing (QNLP). This domain holds the potential to attain a quantum advantage in the processing of linguistic structures, surpassing classical models in both efficiency and accuracy. In this paper, it is proposed to categorise QNLP models based on quantum computing principles, architecture, and computational approaches. This paper attempts to provide a survey on how quantum meets language by mapping state-of-the-art in this area, embracing quantum encoding techniques for classical data, QNLP models for prevalent NLP tasks, and quantum optimisation techniques for hyper parameter tuning. The landscape of quantum computing approaches applied to various NLP tasks is summarised by showcasing the specific QNLP methods used, and the popularity of these methods is indicated by their count. From the findings, it is observed that QNLP approaches are still limited to small data sets, with only a few models explored extensively, and there is increasing interest in the application of quantum computing to natural language processing tasks.
Quantum computing with its capacity to compute multiple possibilities at once, and perform some kinds of calculations almost instantly is one leading edge. The integration of QCs and DL undoubtedly represent one such transformative means for improving Natural Language Processing (NLP). By combining the two, this uses quantum principles of superposition and entanglement to make computation faster regarding human language comprehension limitations in classical computing. Deep learning models, specifically neural networks have already made significant improvements over NLP tasks like language translations, sentiment analysis and text generation. Nevertheless, these models also face scalability and computational efficiency issues with huge volumes of data. Quantum computing offers a solution to all this by reducing the time exponentially that it takes to fetch large amounts of language data and running deep learning algorithms. This paper investigates the opportunities that integrating quantum computing and deep learning into NLP practices might unlock. We drafted the fundamentals of quantum computing and why it is a need over classical computing, where we discussed on how quantum beneficial for data processing & optimization of an algorithm. We then explore applications of quantum enhanced deep learning for NLP, with a focus on the impact that training and inference can have on model performance. We demonstrate the utility of this integration by integrating our four SQDs to showcase improvements on diverse NLP tasks through a series of experiments and case studies. We also demonstrate that hybrid quantum-classical approaches allow the combination of traditional ML and quantum-enhanced models, achieving state-of-the-art performance with respect to effectiveness, scalability and precision
Abstract Hybrid quantum-classical algorithms have emerged as promising candidates for overcoming current limitations of deep learning techniques and recently have attracted a lot of attention for their application in natural language processing (NLP). Among the potential applications of quantum computing in this field, quantum transfer learning—using quantum circuits for fine-tuning pre-trained classical models specific to a task—is regarded as a potential avenue to exploit the potentiality of quantum computers. This study validates, both experimentally and with domain knowledge analysis, the efficacy of quantum transfer learning for two distinct NLP tasks—semantic and syntactic—and employ multilingual data encompassing both English and Italian. In particular is hereby demonstrated that embedded knowledge coming from pre-trained deep learning models can be effectively transferred into a quantum classifier, which shows good performances, either comparable or potentially better than their classical counterparts, with a further reduction of parameters compared to a purely classical classifier. Furthermore, a qualitative linguistic analysis of the results is presented, that elucidates two points: the lack of language dependence in the quantum models and the ability to discriminate with higher precision than standard classifiers, sub-types of linguistic structures.
Abstract Hybrid quantum-classical classifiers promise to positively impact critical aspects of natural language processing tasks, particularly classification-related ones. Among the possibilities currently investigated, quantum transfer learning, i.e., using a quantum circuit for fine-tuning pre-trained classical models for a specific task, is attracting significant attention as a potential platform for proving quantum advantage. This work shows potential advantages, in terms of both performance and expressiveness, of quantum transfer learning algorithms trained on embedding vectors extracted from a large language model to perform classification on a classical linguistics task—acceptability judgements. Acceptability judgement is the ability to determine whether a sentence is considered natural and well-formed by a native speaker. The approach has been tested on sentences extracted from ItaCoLa, a corpus that collects Italian sentences labeled with their acceptability judgement. The evaluation phase shows results for the quantum transfer learning pipeline comparable to state-of-the-art classical transfer learning algorithms, proving current quantum computers’ capabilities to tackle NLP tasks for ready-to-use applications. Furthermore, a qualitative linguistic analysis, aided by explainable AI methods, reveals the capabilities of quantum transfer learning algorithms to correctly classify complex and more structured sentences, compared to their classical counterpart. This finding sets the ground for a quantifiable quantum advantage in NLP in the near future.