Design and Implementation of a Quantum Kernel for Natural Language Processing

Natural language processing (NLP) is the field that attempts to make human language accessible to computers, and it relies on applying a mathematical model to express the meaning of symbolic language. One such model, DisCoCat, defines how to express both the meaning of individual words as well as their compositional nature. This model can be naturally implemented on quantum computers, leading to the field quantum NLP (QNLP). Recent experimental work used quantum machine learning techniques to map from text to class label using the expectation value of the quantum encoded sentence. Theoretical work has been done on computing the similarity of sentences but relies on an unrealized quantum memory store. The main goal of this thesis is to leverage the DisCoCat model to design a quantum-based kernel function that can be used by a support vector machine (SVM) for NLP tasks. Two similarity measures were studied: (i) the transition amplitude approach and (ii) the SWAP test. A simple NLP meaning classification task from previous work was used to train the word embeddings and evaluate the performance of both models. The Python module lambeq and its related software stack was used for implementation. The explicit model from previous work was used to train word embeddings and achieved a testing accuracy of 93.09 ± 0.01%. It was shown that both the SVM variants achieved a higher testing accuracy of 95.72 ± 0.01% for approach (i) and 97.14 ± 0.01% for (ii). The SWAP test was then simulated under a noise model defined by the real quantum device, ibmqguadalupe. The explicit model achieved an accuracy of 91.94 ± 0.01% while the SWAP test SVM achieved 96.7% on the testing dataset, suggesting that the kernelized classifiers are resilient to noise. These are encouraging results and motivate further investigations of our proposed kernelized QNLP paradigm.