In this paper, we introduce and illustrate the novel phenomenon of Conceptual Entanglement which emerges due to the representational manifoldness immanent while incrementally modelling domain ontologies step-by-step across the following five levels: perception, labelling, semantic alignment, hierarchical modelling and intensional definition. In turn, we propose Conceptual Disentanglement, a multi-level conceptual modelling strategy which enforces and explicates, via guiding principles, semantic bijections with respect to each level of conceptual entanglement (across all the above five levels) paving the way for engineering conceptually disentangled domain ontologies. We also briefly argue why state-of-the-art ontology development methodologies and approaches are insufficient with respect to our characterization.

Conceptual entanglement is a crucial phenomenon in quantum cognition because it implies that classical probabilities cannot model non--compositional conceptual phenomena. While several psychological experiments have been developed to test conceptual entanglement, this has not been explored in the context of Natural Language Processing. In this paper, we apply the hypothesis that words of a document are traces of the concepts that a person has in mind when writing the document. Therefore, if these concepts are entangled, we should be able to observe traces of their entanglement in the documents. In particular, we test conceptual entanglement by contrasting language simulations with results obtained from a text corpus. Our analysis indicates that conceptual entanglement is strongly linked to the way in which language is structured. We discuss the implications of this finding in the context of conceptual modeling and of Natural Language Processing.