On the Quantum-like Contextuality of Ambiguous Phrases
This provides a theoretical link between linguistics and quantum mechanics, but it is incremental as it applies existing frameworks to a new domain without solving a practical problem.
The paper tackled the problem of whether natural language exhibits quantum-like contextuality by modeling ambiguous phrases in sheaf-theoretic and Contextuality-by-Default frameworks, showing that they can become possibilistically and probabilistically contextual.
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.