Near-term advances in quantum natural language processing

Abstract

This paper describes experiments showing that some tasks in natural language processing (NLP) can already be performed using quantum computers, though so far only with small datasets. We demonstrate various approaches to topic classification. The first uses an explicit word-based approach, in which word-topic weights are implemented as fractional rotations of individual qubits, and a phrase is classified based on the accumulation of these weights onto a scoring qubit, using entangling quantum gates. This is compared with more scalable quantum encodings of word embedding vectors, which are used to compute kernel values in a quantum support vector machine: this approach achieved an average of 62% accuracy on classification tasks involving over 10000 words, which is the largest such quantum computing experiment to date. We describe a quantum probability approach to bigram modeling that can be applied to understand sequences of words and formal concepts, investigate a generative approximation to these distributions using a quantum circuit Born machine, and introduce an approach to ambiguity resolution in verb-noun composition using single-qubit rotations for simple nouns and 2-qubit entangling gates for simple verbs. The smaller systems presented have been run successfully on physical quantum computers, and the larger ones have been simulated. We show that statistically meaningful results can be obtained, but the quality of individual results varies much more using real datasets than using artificial language examples from previous quantum NLP research. Related NLP research is compared, partly with respect to contemporary challenges including informal language, fluency, and truthfulness.