Quantum transfer learning for acceptability judgements

Abstract Hybrid quantum-classical classifiers promise to positively impact critical aspects of natural language processing tasks, particularly classification-related ones. Among the possibilities currently investigated, quantum transfer learning, i.e., using a quantum circuit for fine-tuning pre-trained classical models for a specific task, is attracting significant attention as a potential platform for proving quantum advantage. This work shows potential advantages, in terms of both performance and expressiveness, of quantum transfer learning algorithms trained on embedding vectors extracted from a large language model to perform classification on a classical linguistics task—acceptability judgements. Acceptability judgement is the ability to determine whether a sentence is considered natural and well-formed by a native speaker. The approach has been tested on sentences extracted from ItaCoLa, a corpus that collects Italian sentences labeled with their acceptability judgement. The evaluation phase shows results for the quantum transfer learning pipeline comparable to state-of-the-art classical transfer learning algorithms, proving current quantum computers’ capabilities to tackle NLP tasks for ready-to-use applications. Furthermore, a qualitative linguistic analysis, aided by explainable AI methods, reveals the capabilities of quantum transfer learning algorithms to correctly classify complex and more structured sentences, compared to their classical counterpart. This finding sets the ground for a quantifiable quantum advantage in NLP in the near future.