Quantum links used to help computers to read

New Scientist : A group at the University of Oxford has been working on a system to enable computers to understand human language, reports New Scientist‘s Jacob Aron. Currently, computers understand sentences only as bunches of words without structure. But Bob Coecke, a lecturer in quantum computer science, and his team used a form of graphical mathematics borrowed from quantum mechanics to encode language and grammar in a set of mathematical rules. The group’s work is to be published in the journal Linguistic Analysis and will be presented next month at the International Conference on Computational Semantics .