Uniqueness of Composition in Quantum Theory and Linguistics

Abstract

We derive a uniqueness result for non-Cartesian composition of systems in a large class of process theories, with important implications for quantum theory and linguistics. Specifically, we consider theories of wavefunctions valued in commutative involutive semirings -- as modelled by categories of free finite-dimensional modules -- and we prove that the only bilinear compact-closed symmetric monoidal structure is the canonical one (up to linear monoidal equivalence). Our results apply to conventional quantum theory and other toy theories of interest in the literature, such as real quantum theory, relational quantum theory, hyperbolic quantum theory and modal quantum theory. In computational linguistics they imply that linear models for categorical compositional distributional semantics (DisCoCat) -- such as vector spaces, sets and relations, and sets and histograms -- admit an (essentially) unique compatible pregroup grammar.

arXiv commentIn Proceedings QPL 2017, arXiv:1802.09737. Authors of this work are listed in alphabetical order

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Cited by in corpus (5)

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• Quantum Algorithms for Compositional Text Processing
• Symmetric Monoidal Structure with Local Character is a Property
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