Bob Coecke

From quantum picturalism to interpretable quantum AI

In 2020 our Oxford-based Quantinuum team performed Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP) on IBM quantum hardware [1,2,3]. Key to having been able to achieve what is conceived as a heavily data-driven task, is the observation that quantum theory and natural language are governed by much of the same compositional structure [4,5,6] – a.k.a. tensor structure. Hence our language model is in a sense quantum-native, and we provide an analogy with simulation of quantum systems in terms of algorithmic speed-up. Meanwhile we have made all our software available open-source, and with support [7]. We will also introduce the notion of compositional intelligence, exploiting the fact that the compositional match between natural language and quantum extends to other domains as well, such as patio-temporal perception [8], we will argue that a new generation of AI can emerge when fully pushing this analogy. The so-called ZX-calculus [9,10] for quantum theory (and linear algebra more generally) has been proven to be complete, so can be conceived as a full-bodied reasoning system that go hand-in-hand with modern machine learning.

1. B. Coecke, G. de Felice, K. Meichanetzidis, and A. Toumi. Foundations for near-term quantum natural language processing, 2020. arXiv:2012.03755. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2012.03755
2. K. Meichanetzidis, A. Toumi, G. de Felice, and B. Coecke. Grammar-aware question-answering on quantum computers. arXiv:2012.03756, 2020. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2012.03756
3. R. Lorenz, A. Pearson, K. Meichanetzidis, D. Kartsalkis, and B. Coecke. Qnlp in practice: Running compositional models of meaning on a quantum computer. arXiv:2102.12846, 2021. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2102.12846
4. S. Clark, B. Coecke, and M. Sadrzadeh. A compositional distributional model of meaning. In Proceedings of the Second Quantum Interaction Symposium (QI-2008), pages 133–140, 2008. url:http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/stephen.clark/papers/qai08.pdf
5. B. Coecke, M. Sadrzadeh, and S. Clark. Mathematical foundations for a compositional distributional model of meaning. In J. van Benthem, M. Moortgat, and W. Buszkowski, editors, A Festschrift for Jim Lambek, volume 36 of Linguistic Analysis, pages 345–384. 2010. arXiv:1003.4394. doi:10.48550/arXiv.1003.4394

2 Bob Coecke
6. S. Clark, B. Coecke, E. Grefenstette, S. Pulman, and M. Sadrzadeh. A quantum teleportation inspired algorithm produces sentence meaning from word meaning and grammatical structure. Malaysian Journal of Mathematical Sciences, 8:15–25, 2014. arXiv:1305.0556. doi:10.48550/arXiv.1305.0556
7. D. Kartsaklis, I. Fan, R. Yeung, A. Pearson, R. Lorenz, A. Toumi, G. de Felice, K. Meichanetzidis, S. Clark, and B. Coecke. lambeq: An efficient high-level Python library for quantum NLP. arXiv:2110.04236, 2021. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2110.04236 8. V. Wang-ma ́scianica and B. Coecke. Talking space: Inference from spa- tial linguistic meanings. Journal of Cognitive Science, 22(3):421–463, 2021. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2109.06554
9. B. Coecke and A. Kissinger. Picturing Quantum Processes. A First Course in Quantum Theory and Diagrammatic Reasoning. Cambridge University Press, 2017. doi:10.1017/9781316219317
10. B. Coecke, D. Horsman, A. Kissinger, and Q. Wang. Kindergarden quantum mechanics graduates... or how i learned to stop gluing LEGO together and love the ZX-calculus. Theoretical Computer Science, 897:1–22, 2022. arXiv:2102.10984. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2102.10984.
 

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Biography

I am Chief Scientist at Quantinuum, head Quantinuum's Oxford-based Quantum NLP & Compositional Intelligence sub-team, I am Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, I am Emeritus Fellow at Wolfson College Oxford, and Visiting Fellow at the Computer Science Department and the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University. Previously I was Professor of Quantum Foundations, Logics and Structures at the Department of Computer Science at Oxford University, where I was 20 years, and co-founded and led a multi-disciplinary Quantum Group that grew to 50 members and I supervised close to 70 PhD students. I am still supervising, at Oxford and elsewhere, and also still teach at Oxford's Mathematical Institute. I pioneered Categorical Quantum Mechanics (now in AMS's MSC2020 classification), ZX-calculus, DisCoCat natural language meaning, mathematical foundations for resource theories, Quantum Natural Language Processing, and DisCoCirc natural language meaning. I co-authored Picturing Quantum Processes, with Aleks Kissinger, a book providing a fully diagrammatic treatment of quantum theory and its applications. I co-authored Quantum in Pictures, with Stefano Gogioso, which does the same, but now accessible to people with no maths background. I co-authored some 200 research papers. I obtained approx. 35 grants, including from NFWO, EPSRC, Leverhulme, EU, ONR, AFOSR, FQXi, JTF. I still hold grants with the latter two. I am a founding father of the QPL (Quantum Physics and Logic) and ACT (Applied Category Theory) communities, of the diamond-open-access journal Compositionality, and Cambridge University Press' Applied Category Theory book series. I was the first person to have Quantum Foundations as part of his academic title. My work has been headlined by various media outlets, including Forbes, New Scientist, PhysicsWorld, ComputerWeekly.
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