While large language models (LLMs) have advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP), their "black box" nature obscures their decision-making processes. To address this, researchers developed structured approaches using higher order tensors. These are able to model linguistic relations, but stall when training on classical computers due to their excessive size. Tensors are natural inhabitants of quantum systems and training on quantum computers provides a solution by translating text to variational quantum circuits. In this paper, we develop MultiQ-NLP: a framework for structure-aware data processing with multimodal text+image data. Here, "structure" refers to syntactic and grammatical relationships in language, as well as the hierarchical organization of visual elements in images. We enrich the translation with new types and type homomorphisms and develop novel architectures to represent structure. When tested on a main stream image classification task (SVO Probes), our best model showed a par performance with the state of the art classical models; moreover the best model was fully structured.
While large language models (LLMs) have advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP), their "black box" nature obscures their decision-making processes. To address this, researchers developed structured approaches using higher order tensors. These are able to model linguistic relations, but stall when training on classical computers due to their excessive size. Tensors are natural inhabitants of quantum systems and training on quantum computers provides a solution by translating text to variational quantum circuits. In this paper, we develop MultiQ-NLP: a framework for structure-aware data processing with multimodal text+image data. Here, "structure" refers to syntactic and grammatical relationships in language, as well as the hierarchical organization of visual elements in images. We enrich the translation with new types and type homomorphisms and develop novel architectures to represent structure. When tested on a main stream image classification task (SVO Probes), our best model showed a par performance with the state of the art classical models; moreover the best model was fully structured.
Despite significant advances in quantum computing across various domains, research on applying quantum approaches to language compositionality - such as modeling linguistic structures and interactions - remains limited. This gap extends to the integration of quantum language data with real-world data from sources like images, video, and audio. This thesis explores how quantum computational methods can enhance the compositional modeling of language through multimodal data integration. Specifically, it advances Multimodal Quantum Natural Language Processing (MQNLP) by applying the Lambeq toolkit to conduct a comparative analysis of four compositional models and evaluate their influence on image-text classification tasks. Results indicate that syntax-based models, particularly DisCoCat and TreeReader, excel in effectively capturing grammatical structures, while bag-of-words and sequential models struggle due to limited syntactic awareness. These findings underscore the potential of quantum methods to enhance language modeling and drive breakthroughs as quantum technology evolves.
Natural language processing (NLP) is at the forefront of great advances in contemporary AI, and it is arguably one of the most challenging areas of the field. At the same time, with the steady growth of quantum hardware and notable improvements towards implementations of quantum algorithms, we are approaching an era when quantum computers perform tasks that cannot be done on classical computers with a reasonable amount of resources. This provides a new range of opportunities for AI, and for NLP specifically. Earlier work has already demonstrated a potential quantum advantage for NLP in a number of manners: (i) algorithmic speedups for search-related or classification tasks, which are the most dominant tasks within NLP, (ii) exponentially large quantum state spaces allow for accommodating complex linguistic structures, (iii) novel models of meaning employing density matrices naturally model linguistic phenomena such as hyponymy and linguistic ambiguity, among others. In this work, we perform the first implementation of an NLP task on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware. Sentences are instantiated as parameterised quantum circuits. We encode word-meanings in quantum states and we explicitly account for grammatical structure, which even in mainstream NLP is not commonplace, by faithfully hard-wiring it as entangling operations. This makes our approach to quantum natural language processing (QNLP) particularly NISQ-friendly. Our novel QNLP model shows concrete promise for scalability as the quality of the quantum hardware improves in the near future.
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 Natural Language Processing (QNLP) is an emerging interdisciplinary field at the intersection of quantum computing, natural language understanding, and formal linguistic theory. As advances in quantum hardware and algorithms accelerate, QNLP promises new paradigms for representation learning, semantic modeling, and efficient computation. However, existing literature remains fragmented, with no unified synthesis across modeling, encoding, and evaluation dimensions.In this work, we present the first systematic and taxonomy driven survey of QNLP that holistically organizes research spanning three core dimensions: computational models, encoding paradigms, and evaluation frameworks. First, we analyze foundational approaches that map linguistic structures into quantum formalism, including categorical compositional models, variational quantum circuits, and hybrid quantum classical architectures. Second, we introduce a unified taxonomy of encoding strategies, ranging from quantum tokenization and state preparation to embedding based encodings, highlighting tradeoffs in scalability, noise resilience, and expressiveness. Third, we provide the first comparative synthesis of evaluation methodologies, benchmark datasets, and performance metrics, while identifying reproducibility and standardization gaps.We further contrast quantum inspired NLP methods with fully quantum implemented systems, offering insights into resource efficiency, hardware feasibility, and real world applicability. Finally, we outline open challenges such as integration with LLMs and unified benchmark design, and propose a research agenda for advancing QNLP as a scalable and reliable discipline.
Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP) is an emerging interdisciplinary field at the intersection of quantum computing, natural language understanding, and formal linguistic theory. As advances in quantum hardware and algorithms accelerate, QNLP promises new paradigms for representation learning, semantic modeling, and efficient computation. However, existing literature remains fragmented, with no unified synthesis across modeling, encoding, and evaluation dimensions.In this work, we present the first systematic and taxonomy driven survey of QNLP that holistically organizes research spanning three core dimensions: computational models, encoding paradigms, and evaluation frameworks. First, we analyze foundational approaches that map linguistic structures into quantum formalism, including categorical compositional models, variational quantum circuits, and hybrid quantum classical architectures. Second, we introduce a unified taxonomy of encoding strategies, ranging from quantum tokenization and state preparation to embedding based encodings, highlighting tradeoffs in scalability, noise resilience, and expressiveness. Third, we provide the first comparative synthesis of evaluation methodologies, benchmark datasets, and performance metrics, while identifying reproducibility and standardization gaps.We further contrast quantum inspired NLP methods with fully quantum implemented systems, offering insights into resource efficiency, hardware feasibility, and real world applicability. Finally, we outline open challenges such as integration with LLMs and unified benchmark design, and propose a research agenda for advancing QNLP as a scalable and reliable discipline.
Abstract Natural language consists of words, sentences, and larger units. Guided by grammatical structure, words compose with each other to form sentences. Similarly, guided by discourse structure, sentences compose with each other to form dialogues and documents. Classical machine learning algorithms have achieved significant success in learning the meanings of words. When it comes to meanings of sentences and discourse units, they however fall short of being compositional. The DisCoCat model of meaning, introduced by Clark, Coecke, and Sadrzadeh in 2010, provides a solution—at the sentence level—using higher-order tensors, the learning of which has been a challenge. A recent initiative known as Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP) introduces a translation between the DisCoCat tensors and Variational Quantum Circuits (VQC). This offers the potential of learning these higher-order tensors more efficiently when the circuits are executed on quantum computers. In previous work, we lifted the DisCoCat framework from the sentence level to the discourse level using a Fock space semantics. In this paper, we extend the DisCoCat-VQC translation to this semantics and experiment with it in a discourse task. We develop a massive dataset with 16,400 entries inspired by a major coreference resolution task, known as the Winograd Schema Challenge, proposed as a test of machine intelligence. Noisy and noiseless simulations were executed on IBMQ software, and the parameters of the discourse VQCs were learnt. The model converged to 77.5% accuracy, surpassing a Bag-of-Words model that neglects any structure. It also outperformed 2 out of 3 state-of-the-art classical coreference resolution architectures. These findings highlight the significant potential of quantum machine learning in advancing discourse analysis and structured natural language processing.