Cambridge Quantum Announce Largest Ever Natural Language Processing Implementation on a Quantum Computer

Separate experiments, each of over 100 sentences, provide a strong proof of concept that Quantum Natural Language Processing is within reach

CAMBRIDGE, United Kingdom, March 2, 2021  /PRNewswire/ -- Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) announces the publication of a research paper on the online pre-print repository arxiv (available here) that provides details of the largest ever experimental implementation of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks on a quantum computer.

Titled "QNLP in Practice: Running Compositional Models of Meaning on a Quantum Computer," the paper presents the first "medium-scale" implementation of common NLP tasks. Completed on an IBM quantum computer, the experiment, which instantiated sentences as parameterised quantum circuits, embeds word meanings as quantum states which are "entangled" according to the grammatical structure of the sentence.

The paper builds on prior proof-of-concept work (see here for the previous experiment) and, significantly, achieves convergence for the far larger datasets that are employed here. One of the objectives of the CQC team is to describe Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP) and their results in a way that is accessible to NLP researchers and practitioners thus paving the way for the NLP community to engage with a quantum encoding of language processing.

Bob Coecke, CQC's Chief Scientist and also the Head of CQC's QNLP project, commented, "We are working on an immensely ambitious project at CQC that is aimed at utilising quantum computers, as they scale, to move beyond expensive black-box mechanisms for NLP to a paradigm where we become more effective, more accurate and more scalable in an area of computer science that epitomises artificial intelligence. Having made considerable progress already on our 'quantum-native' brand of compositional NLP, we are now moving beyond our initial research and working on applications that can be developed in synch with timelines provided by quantum computing hardware companies such as IBM, Honeywell, Google and others."

He added, "Equally, at a time when quantum computing is becoming a topic of general interest it is imperative that those of us who are working within this sector provide results that are verifiable. Our record of publication at CQC strives at all times to meet these exacting standards – we are science led and enterprise driven."

About CQC

Founded in 2014 and backed by some of the world's leading quantum computing companies, CQC is a global leader in quantum software and quantum algorithms, enabling clients to achieve the most out of rapidly evolving quantum computing hardware. CQC has offices in the UK, USA and Japan with a team of 140 professionals. For more information, visit CQC at http://www.cambridgequantum.com and on LinkedIn. Access the tket Python module on GitHub.