Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) has just announced hiring Stephen Clark as head of AI last week, a move meaning the company will be shifting some of its research and development efforts toward Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP).
Recent research established that quantum computers, even with their current limitations, could learn to reason with the uncertainty that is part of real-world scenarios.
QNLP could enable grammar-aware representation of language that makes sense of text at a deeper level than is currently available with state-of-the-art NLP algorithms like Bert and GPT 3.0. The company has already demonstrated some early success in representing and processing text using quantum computers, suggesting that QNLP is within reach.
Clark was previously senior staff research scientist at DeepMind and led a team working on grounded language learning in virtual environments. He has a long history with CQC chief scientist Bob Coecke, with whom he collaborated 15 years ago to devise a novel approach for processing language. (VentureBeat)