Classical Copying versus Quantum Entanglement in Natural Language: The Case of VP-ellipsis

Understand

This paper compares classical copying and quantum entanglement in natural language by considering the case of verb phrase (VP) ellipsis.

• VP ellipsis is a non-linear linguistic phenomenon that requires the reuse of resources, making it the ideal test case for a comparative study of different copying behaviours in compositional models of natural language.
• Following the line of research in compositional distributional semantics set out by (Coecke et al., 2010) we develop an extension of the Lambek calculus which admits a controlled form of contraction to deal with the copying of linguistic resources.
• We then develop two different compositional models of distributional meaning for this calculus.