Multilingual multi-task quantum transfer learning

Abstract Hybrid quantum-classical algorithms have emerged as promising candidates for overcoming current limitations of deep learning techniques and recently have attracted a lot of attention for their application in natural language processing (NLP). Among the potential applications of quantum computing in this field, quantum transfer learning—using quantum circuits for fine-tuning pre-trained classical models specific to a task—is regarded as a potential avenue to exploit the potentiality of quantum computers. This study validates, both experimentally and with domain knowledge analysis, the efficacy of quantum transfer learning for two distinct NLP tasks—semantic and syntactic—and employ multilingual data encompassing both English and Italian. In particular is hereby demonstrated that embedded knowledge coming from pre-trained deep learning models can be effectively transferred into a quantum classifier, which shows good performances, either comparable or potentially better than their classical counterparts, with a further reduction of parameters compared to a purely classical classifier. Furthermore, a qualitative linguistic analysis of the results is presented, that elucidates two points: the lack of language dependence in the quantum models and the ability to discriminate with higher precision than standard classifiers, sub-types of linguistic structures.