This paper proposes a novel concept within Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP) to encode the interpersonal metafunction of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), particularly tenor, into quantum circuits by treating Japanese honorifics seriously. Because of English language bias in the literature, the incorporation of nuanced aspects of interpersonal communication evident in languages, such as the aforesaid Japanese, remains under-developed and overlooked. Utilizing lambeq, monoidal categories, and string diagrams, this study extends lambeq’s quantum computing framework to capture not only grammar but also social context—specifically the roles and relationships that define interpersonal interactions in quantum circuits. This approach represents a significant step toward that end simply by defining the honorific type h in lambeq. This innovative strategy exposes the capability of quantum circuits to model the complex structures of language, moving beyond grammar and even semantics—the horizontal, textual dimension of language—to embrace the vertical, hierarchical dimension of human communication and social interaction. Through this lens, the paper underscores the potential of QNLP to transcend traditional linguistic analysis, advocating for a broader and more nuanced understanding of language that includes not only what is said but also the social persona of the interlocutors. An algorithm for parsing Japanese grammar into pregroup diagrams containing the h type is introduced along with a codebase for other researchers to use and to which to contribute. Lastly, a toy experiment is performed to demonstrate that the circuits generated from these pregroup diagrams are suitable for Quantum Machine Learning (QML) applications.
This paper proposes a novel concept within Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP) to encode the interpersonal metafunction of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), particularly tenor, into quantum circuits by treating Japanese honorifics seriously. Because of English language bias in the literature, the incorporation of nuanced aspects of interpersonal communication evident in languages, such as the aforesaid Japanese, remains under-developed and overlooked. Utilizing lambeq, monoidal categories, and string diagrams, this study extends lambeq’s quantum computing framework to capture not only grammar but also social context—specifically the roles and relationships that define interpersonal interactions in quantum circuits. This approach represents a significant step toward that end simply by defining the honorific type h in lambeq. This innovative strategy exposes the capability of quantum circuits to model the complex structures of language, moving beyond grammar and even semantics—the horizontal, textual dimension of language—to embrace the vertical, hierarchical dimension of human communication and social interaction. Through this lens, the paper underscores the potential of QNLP to transcend traditional linguistic analysis, advocating for a broader and more nuanced understanding of language that includes not only what is said but also the social persona of the interlocutors. An algorithm for parsing Japanese grammar into pregroup diagrams containing the h type is introduced along with a codebase for other researchers to use and to which to contribute. Lastly, a toy experiment is performed to demonstrate that the circuits generated from these pregroup diagrams are suitable for Quantum Machine Learning (QML) applications.
This paper proposes a novel concept within Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP) to encode the interpersonal metafunction of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), particularly tenor, into quantum circuits by treating Japanese honorifics seriously. Because of English language bias in the literature, the incorporation of nuanced aspects of interpersonal communication evident in low-resource languages like Japanese remains underdeveloped and overlooked. This study leverages the quantum computing Python package lambeq to capture grammar and social context specifically, the roles and relationships that define interpersonal interactions in quantum circuits. The newly introduced honorific type h accomplishes this end. This strategy exposes the capability of quantum circuits to model the complex structures of language, moving beyond grammar the horizontal, textual dimension of SFL to embrace the vertical, hierarchical dimension of human communication and social interaction more broadly. Through this lens, the paper underscores the potential of QNLP to transcend traditional linguistic analysis, advocating for a broader and more nuanced understanding of language that includes both the spoken word and the interlocutors’ social persona. An algorithm for parsing Japanese grammar into pre-group diagrams containing the h type is introduced along with a codebase for other researchers to use and to which to contribute. Lastly, a binary classification experiment demonstrates that the circuits generated from these pre-group diagrams are suitable for Quantum Machine Learning (QML) applications. Keywords Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP); Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL); Japanese honorifics; Interpersonal metafunction; lambeq; Pre-group grammar; Quantum Machine Learning (QML)
Quantum approaches to natural language processing (NLP) are redefining how linguistic information is represented and processed. While traditional hybrid quantum-classical models rely heavily on classical neural networks, recent advancements propose a novel framework, DisCoCirc, capable of directly encoding entire documents as parameterised quantum circuits (PQCs), besides enjoying some additional interpretability and compositionality benefits. Following these ideas, this paper introduces an efficient methodology for converting large-scale texts into quantum circuits using tree-like representations of pregroup diagrams. Exploiting the compositional parallels between language and quantum mechanics, grounded in symmetric monoidal categories, our approach enables faithful and efficient encoding of syntactic and discourse relationships in long and complex texts (up to 6410 words in our experiments) to quantum circuits. The developed system is provided to the community as part of the augmented open-source quantum NLP package lambeq Gen II.
Quantum Natural language processing (QNLP) is the new technology that incorporates the theory of quantum computing with the linguistic theory to make more effective and transparent models of comprehending natural language. The paper proposes QNLP model of type combining the vector space semantics and the graphical ZX-calculus, applicable to quantum computing to describe, process, and interpret the sentences structure as a quantum circuit. Its approach includes a sentence parsing with a categorial grammar, a mapping of the semantic constituents to products of high dimensional Hilbert spaces and a representation of their interaction with the so-called ZX-diagrams. Such circuits are compiled into quantum instructions and emulated on quantum devices such as Qiskit. The model was compared in terms of the accuracy of parse, preservation of semantics, diagrammatic effectiveness, quantum fidelity and sentence reprehensibility. This has been demonstrated to match the outputs of classical and quantum semantics, by 86 percent on parsing accuracy and above 96% on quantum circuit fidelity. The paper shows ZX-calculus is a potentially powerful and understandable framework to construct large-scale and semantically rich QNLP systems, given near-term quantum hardware.
We provide conceptual and mathematical foundations for near-term quantum natural language processing (QNLP), and do so in quantum computer scientist friendly terms. We opted for an expository presentation style, and provide references for supporting empirical evidence and formal statements concerning mathematical generality. We recall how the quantum model for natural language that we employ canonically combines linguistic meanings with rich linguistic structure, most notably grammar. In particular, the fact that it takes a quantum-like model to combine meaning and structure, establishes QNLP as quantum-native, on par with simulation of quantum systems. Moreover, the now leading Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) paradigm for encoding classical data on quantum hardware, variational quantum circuits, makes NISQ exceptionally QNLP-friendly: linguistic structure can be encoded as a free lunch, in contrast to the apparently exponentially expensive classical encoding of grammar. Quantum speed-up for QNLP tasks has already been established in previous work with Will Zeng. Here we provide a broader range of tasks which all enjoy the same advantage. Diagrammatic reasoning is at the heart of QNLP. Firstly, the quantum model interprets language as quantum processes via the diagrammatic formalism of categorical quantum mechanics. Secondly, these diagrams are via ZX-calculus translated into quantum circuits. Parameterisations of meanings then become the circuit variables to be learned. Our encoding of linguistic structure within quantum circuits also embodies a novel approach for establishing word-meanings that goes beyond the current standards in mainstream AI, by placing linguistic structure at the heart of Wittgenstein's meaning-is-context.
In this work, we describe a full-stack pipeline for natural language processing on near-term quantum computers, aka QNLP. The language-modelling framework we employ is that of compositional distributional semantics (DisCoCat), which extends and complements the compositional structure of pregroup grammars. Within this model, the grammatical reduction of a sentence is interpreted as a diagram, encoding a specific interaction of words according to the grammar. It is this interaction which, together with a specific choice of word embedding, realises the meaning (or "semantics") of a sentence. Building on the formal quantum-like nature of such interactions, we present a method for mapping DisCoCat diagrams to quantum circuits. Our methodology is compatible both with NISQ devices and with established Quantum Machine Learning techniques, paving the way to near-term applications of quantum technology to natural language processing.
Advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP), whether on classical or quantum platforms, have predominantly focused on English due to its widespread use and abundant linguistic resources. Although English remains the most studied language in computational linguistics, Hindi, the third most spoken language worldwide after Mandarin, has received comparatively limited attention. Spoken primarily in India, Hindi differs significantly from English in its script, syntactic structure, and linguistic characteristics. Hindi uses the Devanagari script, exhibits rich morphological inflection, and follows a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order, unlike English's subject-verb-object (SVO) structure. Motivated by Hindi's linguistic complexity and its underrepresentation in Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP), we propose a grammar-aware QNLP pipeline for Hindi sentiment classification with a focus on sentential negation. We use a manually annotated Hindi sentiment dataset labeled as positive, negative, or neutral, and encode sentences using pregroup grammar types. Sentences are processed with Lambeq to generate quantum circuits using a novel negation-aware compositional grammar. Hybrid Quantum Neural Networks (HQNNs) are trained for both binary and ternary sentiment classification. Our results demonstrate effective sentiment classification and highlight the potential of compositional QNLP for morphologically rich languages.