On the Quantum-like Contextuality of Ambiguous Phrases
Daphne Wang, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Samson Abramsky, Victor Cervantes
Abstract
Language is contextual as meanings of words are dependent on their contexts. Contextuality is, concomitantly, a well-defined concept in quantum mechanics where it is considered a major resource for quantum computations. We investigate whether natural language exhibits any of the quantum mechanics’ contextual features. We show that meaning combinations in ambiguous phrases can be modelled in the sheaf-theoretic framework for quantum contextuality, where they can become possibilistically contextual. Using the framework of Contextuality-by-Default (CbD), we explore the probabilistic variants of these and show that CbD-contextuality is also possible.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.semspace-1.5
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2021 Workshop on Semantic Spaces at the Intersection of NLP, Physics, and Cognitive Science (SemSpace)
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Groningen, The Netherlands
- Editors:
- Martha Lewis, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh
- Venue:
- SemSpace
- SIG:
- SIGSEM
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 42–52
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.semspace-1.5
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Daphne Wang, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Samson Abramsky, and Victor Cervantes. 2021. On the Quantum-like Contextuality of Ambiguous Phrases. In Proceedings of the 2021 Workshop on Semantic Spaces at the Intersection of NLP, Physics, and Cognitive Science (SemSpace), pages 42–52, Groningen, The Netherlands. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- On the Quantum-like Contextuality of Ambiguous Phrases (Wang et al., SemSpace 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2021.semspace-1.5.pdf