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Procedia Computer Science

Quantum Theory-Inspired Search

Diederik Aerts, Peter Bruza, Yuexian Hou, Joemon M. Jose, Massimo Melucci, Jian‐Yun Nie, Dawei Song

Published Jan 1, 2011• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

With the huge number and diversity of the users, the advertising products and services, the rapid growth of online multimedia resources, the context of information needs are even more broad and complex. Although research in search engine technology has led to various models over the past three decades, the investigation for effectively integrating the dimensions of context to deploy advanced search technology has been limited due to the lack of a unified modeling and evaluation framework. Quantum Theory (QT) has created new and unprecedented means for communicating and computing. Besides computer science, optics, electronics, physics, QT and search engine technology can be combined: interference in user interaction; entanglement in cognition; superposition in word meaning; non-classical probability in information ranking; complex vector spaces in multimedia search. This paper highlights our recent results on QT-inspired search engine technology.

DOI
10.1016/j.procs.2011.09.050

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With the huge number and diversity of the users, the advertising products and services, the rapid growth of online multimedia resources, the context of information needs are even more broad and complex. Although research in search engine technology has led to various models over the past three decades, the investigation for effectively integrating the dimensions of context to deploy advanced search technology has been limited due to the lack of a unified modeling and evaluation framework. Quantum Theory (QT) has created new and unprecedented means for communicating and computing. Besides computer science, optics, electronics, physics, QT and search engine technology can be combined: interference in user interaction; entanglement in cognition; superposition in word meaning; non-classical probability in information ranking; complex vector spaces in multimedia search. This paper highlights our recent results on QT-inspired search engine technology.
The introduction of Quantum Theory (QT) provides a unified mathematical framework for Information Retrieval (IR). Compared with the classical IR framework, the quantum-inspired IR framework is based on user-centered modeling methods to model non-classical cognitive phenomena in human relevance judgment in the IR process. With the increase of data and computing resources, neural IR methods have been applied to the text matching and understanding task of IR. Neural networks have a strong learning ability of effective representation and generalization of matching patterns from raw data. This monograph provides a systematic introduction to quantum-inspired neural IR, including quantum-inspired neural language representation, matching and understanding. The cross-field research on QT, neural network and IR is not only helpful to non-classical phenomena modeling in IR but also to break the theoretical bottleneck of neural networks and design more transparent neural IR models. The authors first introduce the language representation method based on QT. Secondly, they introduce the quantum-inspired text matching and decision making model under neural network that shows its theoretical advantages in document ranking, relevance matching, multimodal IR, and can be integrated with neural network to jointly promote the development of IR. Finally, the latest progress of quantum language understanding is introduced and further topics on QT and language modeling provide readers with more materials for thinking.
Quantum-inspired algorithms represent an important direction in modern software information technologies that use heuristic methods and approaches of quantum science. This work presents a quantum approach for document search, retrieval, and ranking based on the Bell-like test, which is well-known in quantum physics. We propose quantum probability theory in the hyperspace analog to language (HAL) framework exploiting a Hilbert space for word and document vector specification. The quantum approach allows for accounting for specific user preferences in different contexts. To verify the algorithm proposed, we use a dataset of synthetic advertising text documents from travel agencies generated by the OpenAI GPT-4 model. We show that the "entanglement" in two-word document search and retrieval can be recognized as the frequent occurrence of two words in incompatible query contexts. We have found that the user preferences and word ordering in the query play a significant role in relatively small sizes of the HAL window. The comparison with the cosine similarity metrics demonstrates the key advantages of our approach based on the user-enforced contextual and semantic relationships between words and not just their superficial occurrence in texts. Our approach to retrieving and ranking documents allows for the creation of new information search engines that require no resource-intensive deep machine learning algorithms.
This thesis is fundamentally about using conceptual and mathematical constructs from the area of Quantum Theory in Information Retrieval (IR). The need and motivation for this is two-fold – firstly, it has been increasingly shown in decision sciences that human decision-making does not always conform to the norms of traditional probability and logic framework. The quantum framework offers a generalised probability and logic framework which can model decisions or judgements under dynamic context and ambiguity. Secondly, there is a need in IR for theories and models which improve our understanding of user behaviour. Hence it is worth exploring the combination of the quantum framework and IR, especially focused on the user aspects of IR. The overarching research question is whether there is evidence of user behaviour in IR scenarios which warrants the need for a quantum based approach by way of showing the limitations of the traditional (classical) approach. The methodology involves analysing data to detect quantum-like phenomena of interference, contextuality, incompatibility, etc. from two common data sources in IR–standard datasets like query log data, and through crowdsourced user studies designed similar to some quantum physics or cognitive science experiments. While the evidence of quantum-like phenomena from standard datasets is not convincing, we find that some of the user studies reveal the quantum-like structure of document judgements. One of the key findings which has implication for IR is the dynamic interactions between the different dimensions of relevance. For example, a user’s judgement of reliability of a document depends significantly on whether they found it understandable or not. Thus, the consideration of one relevance dimension or document feature can provide a context for another dimension, contrary to the current IR models which consider these features to be independent of each other and an objective property of the document. The quantum framework has been especially designed to deal with such scenarios where properties of systems or objects do not exist independent of measurement context. The thesis concludes with suggestions about incorporating quantum mathematical constructs into state-of-art IR algorithms.
Since 2004, researchers have been using the mathematical framework of quantum theory in information retrieval (IR). Quantum theory offers a generalized probability and logic framework. Such a framework has been shown to be capable of unifying the representation, ranking, and user cognitive aspects of IR, and helpful in developing more dynamic, adaptive, and context-aware IR systems. Although quantum-inspired IR is still a growing area, a wide array of work in different aspects of IR has been done and produced promising results. This article presents a survey of the research done in this area, aiming to show the landscape of the field and draw a road map of future directions.
The intersection of quantum computing and multimedia retrieval represents a rapidly evolving field that leverages quantum mechanical principles to enhance traditional information retrieval systems.Recent research demonstrates that quantum technology offers significant advantages in processing, searching and retrieving multimedia content including images, audio and video data.These quantum-enhanced approaches show promise for achieving computational speedups, improved accuracy and novel capabilities that surpass classical methods through the exploitation of quantum phenomena such as superposition, entanglement and quantum parallelism.
The word 'quantum' comes from the Latin word quantus meaning 'how much'. Quantum computing is a fundamentally new mode of information processing that can be performed only by harnessing physical phenomena unique to quantum mechanics (especially quantum interference). Paul Benioff of the Argonne National Laboratory first applied quantum theory to computers in 1981 and David Deutsch of Oxford proposed quantum parallel computers in 1985, years before the realization of qubits in 1995. However, it may be well into the 21st century before we see quantum computing used at a commercial level for a variety of reasons discussed in this paper. The subject of quantum computing brings together ideas from classical information theory, computer science, and quantum physics. This paper discusses some of the current advances, applications, and chal-lenges of quantum computing as well as its impact on corporate computing and implications for management. It shows how quantum computing can be utilized to process and store information, as well as impact cryptography for perfectly secure communication, algorithmic searching, factorizing large numbers very rapidly, and simulating quantum-mechanical systems efficiently. A broad interdisciplinary effort will be needed if quantum com-puters are to fulfill their destiny as the world's fastest computing devices.