Quantum aspects of semantic analysis and symbolic artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (68T99) Computing methodologies and applications (68U99) Foundations, quantum information and its processing, quantum axioms, and philosophy (81P99) Linguistics (91F20) Information theory (general) (94A15)

Abstract: Modern approaches to semanic analysis if reformulated as Hilbert-space problems reveal formal structures known from quantum mechanics. Similar situation is found in distributed representations of cognitive structures developed for the purposes of neural networks. We take a closer look at similarites and differences between the above two fields and quantum information theory.

Review text

Trying to understand the theory that the authors are unfolding, the reviewer has become convinced that the formalisms of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory could be fruitfully employed to analyze problems of semantics. Unfortunately, semantics is not a branch of quantum physics. Direct application of Dirac's formalism without precise description of the ``semantic state space, ``semantic observables and, e.g. ``semantic propagators reduces the procedures to a fascinating fairy tale. The authors employ the notion of Fock space (supposedly Bose-Fock space or is it Fermi's?) which is the consequence of performing the second quantization -- but the second quantization of what? Quoted examples are supposed to enlighten the reader which state space and which observables the authors consider but this is not clear enough. In Section 4 a kind of Dirac bracket notation is used and a kind of state space emerges consisting of what the authors call the ``sentence vectors. Still the bra-ket scalar product is not explicitly defined. Probably study of references would help unraveling the actual meaning of the underlying formalism. Physicists backed up by theoretical and mathematical physics can afford some lack of precision in formulating themselves -- there is enough well established background formalism to straighten possible confusions. Such a background does not exist in quantum semantics hence one must be more careful while founding a theory.

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