Quantum Natural Language Processing: A Comprehensive Review of Models, Methods, and Applications

Abstract: In recent developments, deep learning methodologies applied to NLP have revealed a paradox: They improve performance but demand considerable data and resources for their training. Alternatively, quantum computing exploits the principles of quantum mechanics to overcome the computational limitations of current methodologies, thereby establishing an emerging field known as quantum natural language processing (QNLP). This domain holds the potential to attain a quantum advantage in the processing of linguistic structures, surpassing classical models in both efficiency and accuracy. In this paper, it is proposed to categorise QNLP models based on quantum computing principles, architecture, and computational approaches. This paper attempts to provide a survey on how quantum meets language by mapping state-of-the-art in this area, embracing quantum encoding techniques for classical data, QNLP models for prevalent NLP tasks, and quantum optimisation techniques for hyper parameter tuning. The landscape of quantum computing approaches applied to various NLP tasks is summarised by showcasing the specific QNLP methods used, and the popularity of these methods is indicated by their count. From the findings, it is observed that QNLP approaches are still limited to small data sets, with only a few models explored extensively, and there is increasing interest in the application of quantum computing to natural language processing tasks.