A Quantum-Theoretic Approach to Distributional Semantics

William Blacoe, Elham Kashefi and Mirella Lapata

In this paper we explore the potential of quantum theory as a formal framework for capturing lexical meaning. We present a novel semantic space model that is syntactically aware, takes word order into account, and features key quantum aspects such as superposition and entanglement. We define a dependency-based Hilbert space and show how to represent the meaning of words by density matrices that encode dependency neighborhoods. Experiments on word similarity and association reveal that our model achieves results competitive with a variety of classical models.