Quantum Natural Language Generation on Near-Term Devices
This work addresses natural language and music generation for researchers in quantum computing and NLP, but it is incremental as it adapts existing techniques to a new domain.
The paper tackled the problem of sentence generation by designing a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm based on simulated annealing, demonstrating successful implementation on simulated and real quantum hardware, with a variant also applicable to music generation.
The emergence of noisy medium-scale quantum devices has led to proof-of-concept applications for quantum computing in various domains. Examples include Natural Language Processing (NLP) where sentence classification experiments have been carried out, as well as procedural generation, where tasks such as geopolitical map creation, and image manipulation have been performed. We explore applications at the intersection of these two areas by designing a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm for sentence generation. Our algorithm is based on the well-known simulated annealing technique for combinatorial optimisation. An implementation is provided and used to demonstrate successful sentence generation on both simulated and real quantum hardware. A variant of our algorithm can also be used for music generation. This paper aims to be self-contained, introducing all the necessary background on NLP and quantum computing along the way.