QTrans: A Quantum Transformer for Sentiment Classification

In small-scale binary sentiment classification scenarios, factors such as negation, contrastive shifts, and cross-word dependencies lead to the non-linear coupling of sentiment cues, making it difficult for conventional lightweight models to fully capture the contextual relationships between tokens. To address this issue, we propose a model named QTrans, which uses parameterized quantum circuits to construct query, key, and value features and derives attention coefficients from Gaussian distances between quantum measurements. By further integrating a quantum feed-forward neural network, residual connections, and layer normalization, the model establishes an end-to-end trainable quantum-classical hybrid framework for sentiment classification. Experimental results on the MR, CR, and MPQA datasets show that QTrans achieves test accuracies of 72.13%, 69.51%, and 63.45%, respectively, representing improvements of 2.88, 3.17, and 3.79 percentage points over the best-performing classical baselines for each dataset. Overall, QTrans expands the application of parameterized quantum circuits in lightweight sentiment analysis and lays an experimental foundation for further research into quantum multi-head self-attention for modeling textual relationships.