The Quantum Group at the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, with support from Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) and IBM, are organizing a two-day conference, Introducing QNLP: embracing the NISQ era, taking place at St. Aldate's Church, on 5 and 6 December 2019.

The purpose of the conference is to establish a dialogue centered around compositional natural language processing (NLP) and applications on quantum hardware. Applied category theory has provided compositional NLP with mathematical foundations that share similarity to those of quantum theory, suggesting that quantum computers provide a natural setting for compositional NLP tasks [1]. Furthermore, ideas from condensed matter physics have made their way into NLP [2,3]. In recent years, Quantum Artificial Intelligence (QAI) has enjoyed fruitful research activity. As noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers have become readily accessible, the time is right to explore the possible advantages of performing NLP on such NISQ devices. This endeavor is to be understood as an emerging subfield of QAI, namely Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP). Our ambition is that participants from both the academic and the private sector working on the tangent fields of quantum computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as linguistics, come together and coordinate to build an active community on the novel and timely field of QNLP.