From 5 to 6 December, a conference on QNLP took place at St. Aldate’s Church in Oxford. This event was organized by the Quantum Group at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Oxford with support from the companies Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) and IBM. The two members Cedric Möller and Daniel Steinigen of the SDA team in Dresden participated in the conference. This was also the first conference ever about this combination of NLP with quantum computing.
Quantum Artificial Intelligence (QAI) has become increasingly interesting for research activities in the recent years. Noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers already provide the ability to perform algorithms and to find possible advantages for NLP. Since mathematical foundations of quantum theory are very similar to those of compositional NLP with applied category theory, quantum computers should provide a natural setting for compositional NLP tasks [1].
[1] Zeng, Coecke – Quantum Algorithms for Compositional Natural Language Processing https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.01406