Measuring Conceptual Entanglement in Collections of Documents

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether the concept of entanglement from quantum cognition can be observed in natural language documents, suggesting that language structure reflects underlying conceptual entanglement.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to detect conceptual entanglement in text, bridging quantum cognition theories with natural language processing.

Findings

Conceptual entanglement correlates with language structure

Language simulations can reflect entanglement patterns

Implications for conceptual modeling and NLP

Abstract

Conceptual entanglement is a crucial phenomenon in quantum cognition because it implies that classical probabilities cannot model non--compositional conceptual phenomena. While several psychological experiments have been developed to test conceptual entanglement, this has not been explored in the context of Natural Language Processing. In this paper, we apply the hypothesis that words of a document are traces of the concepts that a person has in mind when writing the document. Therefore, if these concepts are entangled, we should be able to observe traces of their entanglement in the documents. In particular, we test conceptual entanglement by contrasting language simulations with results obtained from a text corpus. Our analysis indicates that conceptual entanglement is strongly linked to the way in which language is structured. We discuss the implications of this finding in the context of conceptual modeling and of Natural Language Processing.