The BBC and University College London (UCL) have partnered with Quantinuum, an integrated quantum computing startup, to investigate the commercial potential of quantum natural language processing (QNLP). Funded by the Royal Academy of Engineering for a Senior Research Fellowship at UCL, Professor Bob Coecke, Quantinuum’s chief scientist), Professor Stephen Clark (head of artificial intelligence) and Professor Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh of UCL Computer Science will conduct a long-term exploration of quantum mechanics and linguistics.
To enable tasks like content discovery and archival retrieval, the BBC seeks innovative ways to express content in formats that computers can understand. Built f prior work by Sadrzadeh on enhancing personalized recommendations through multimodal data services.
“Developing quantum computing so that the broadest and most diverse populations can benefit, means looking across the timing spectrum at applications that can be made productive in the short, medium and long term. As part of our long-term work, we anticipate that true language processing will become important with fault tolerant quantum processors, and our work with the BBC and UCL is a very significant step towards being prepared to take advantage of quantum computers when they become available at scale. Quantinuum is a leader in the fields in which it operates, and this leadership is built on deeply meaningful collaborations such as this.”
Ilyas Khan, founder of Cambridge Quantum Computing and CEO of Quantinuum
In the publication of Mathematical Foundations of a Compositional Distributional Model of Meaning in 2011, the researchers constructed a unified model of statistical and compositional meaning for natural language. Professor Coecke’s Categorical quantum mechanics formalism became the foundation of the foundational framework.
The methods first introduced in the papers The Mathematics of Text Structure and Evaluating Composition Models for Verb Phrase Elliptical Sentence Embeddings will advance from academic research to a scaled industrial level, expanding capabilities from simple sentence level to general text. In the UK and beyond, the broadcaster’s archives span a century of world news and cultural life. In addition to toys, games, merchandise, artefacts, and historical machinery, the archive has about 15 million objects, including audio, film, and text documents.
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