# A CCG-Based Version of the DisCoCat Framework

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.07720 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07720/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [QNLP in Practice: Running Compositional Models of Meaning on a Quantum Computer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12846/) (2021)
- [A* CCG Parsing with a Supertag and Dependency Factored Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06936/) (2017)
- [Open System Categorical Quantum Semantics in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.00831/) (2015)
- [Lambek vs. Lambek: Functorial Vector Space Semantics and String Diagrams for Lambek Calculus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1302.0393/) (2013)
- [Reasoning about Meaning in Natural Language with Compact Closed Categories and Frobenius Algebras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1401.5980/) (2014)
- [Graded Entailment for Compositional Distributional Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.04908/) (2016)
- [Category-Theoretic Quantitative Compositional Distributional Models of Natural Language Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.1539/) (2013)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [lambeq: An Efficient High-Level Python Library for Quantum NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04236/) (2021)
- [Applying QNLP to sentiment analysis in finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11788/) (2023)
- [Towards Compositional Interpretability for XAI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17583/) (2024)
- [A Quantum Natural Language Processing Approach to Musical Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06741/) (2021)
- [Quantum Natural Language Generation on Near-Term Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00727/) (2022)
- [Grammar Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07485/) (2021)
- [Distilling Text into Circuits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10595/) (2023)
- [Something Old, Something New: Grammar-based CCG Parsing with Transformer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10044/) (2021)
- [Talking Space: inference from spatial linguistic meanings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06554/) (2021)
- [Quantum Natural Language Processing based Sentiment Analysis using lambeq Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19383/) (2023)
- [DisCoCLIP: A Distributional Compositional Tensor Network Encoder for Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21287/) (2025)
- [Higher-Order DisCoCat (Peirce-Lambek-Montague semantics)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17813/) (2023)
- [Towards Property-Based Tests in Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03616/) (2022)
- [Towards Transparency in Coreference Resolution: A Quantum-Inspired Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00688/) (2023)
- [DisCoCat for Donkey Sentences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04519/) (2023)
- [Trustworthy Formal Natural Language Specifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03885/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While the DisCoCat model (Coecke et al., 2010) has been proved a valuable tool for studying compositional aspects of language at the level of semantics, its strong dependency on pregroup grammars poses important restrictions: first, it prevents large-scale experimentation due to the absence of a pregroup parser; and second, it limits the expressibility of the model to context-free grammars. In this paper we solve these problems by reformulating DisCoCat as a passage from Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) to a category of semantics. We start by showing that standard categorial grammars can be expressed as a biclosed category, where all rules emerge as currying/uncurrying the identity; we then proceed to model permutation-inducing rules by exploiting the symmetry of the compact closed category encoding the word meaning. We provide a proof of concept for our method, converting "Alice in Wonderland" into DisCoCat form, a corpus that we make available to the community.