Quantum Natural Language Processing

A sentence is not just a "bag of words",¹ but rather, a kind of network in which words interact in a particular fashion. Some 10 years ago one of the authors of this article (BC), together with two colleagues, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh and Steve Clark, started to draw these networks. This lead to a graphical representation of how the meanings of the words are combined to build the meaning of a sentence as a whole, as opposed to treating the sentence as a structureless "bag" containing the meanings of individual words. These results have subsequently become widely known, and at the time were also a cover-heading feature in New Scientist.² The "drawn" networks look like this: In order to understand better how these networks operate, let's consider a slightly simpler example: The idea here is that the boxes represent the meanings of words and that the wires are channels through which these meanings can be transmitted.