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Semantic Quantum Correlations in Hate Speeches

Francesco Galofaro
Università degli Studi di Torino - DFE Dipartimento di Filosofia e scienze dell’educazione
francesco.galofaro@unito.it

Zeno Toffano
CentraleSupélec, Laboratoire des signaux et systems
zeno.toffano@centralesupelec.fr

Bich Lien Doan

CentraleSupélec, Laboratoire des signaux et systems
bich-lien.doan@centralesupelec.fr

Abstract The intervention shows the first results of a research conducted on a corpus
of 7000 posts collected on the Reddit social network during the 2016 American
presidential campaign. The research is the result of a collaboration between Berkeley D-
Lab, who shared the corpus, LSI - CentraleSupélec and CUBE. Thanks to funding from
the Anti-Defamation League, the corpus has been labeled to apply Machine Learning
techniques: 400 posts have been labeled as “hate speech” by human analysts. Galofaro,
Toffano and Doan applied to both sub-corpora (hate and non-hate speeches) an
analysis technique inspired by Greimas’s structural semantics, Eco’s semiotics, and
Quantum Information Retrieval (van Rijsbergen).
Each text was formalized as a semantic network using the HAL technique. We then
measured the semantic similarity between two key words formalized as two word-
vectors with the classical measure of cosine-similarity and then compared it with the
degree of quantum correlation between them measured with the Born rule. This
correlation, linked to the co-occurrence of the word vectors in the same contexts,
extracts from the latter useful information to characterize the considered semantic
relationships (“presence of correlation”, “absence of correlation” or “presence of anti-
correlation”). In this way, the new technique allows to overcome some critical aspects of
the Machine Learning techniques currently in use, being based on the meaning of the
text and not on the way in which the human analyst labels the corpus.

Keywords: Semiotics, Semantics, Quantum Information Retrieval, Hate Speech,

Political discourse

Accepted 8 May 2020.

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1. Hate speeches: definition and problems

According to John Nockleby hate speech is «any communication that disparages a
person or a group on the basis of some characteristics (to be referred to as types of hate
or hate classes) such as race, colour, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality,
religion, or other characteristics» (Nockleby 2000). Hate speeches became a political
problem in parallel with the diffusion of social networks. In 2012 The percentage of
European young people which have encountered hate speech online stood at 80%,
while the percentage of young people which felt attacked or threatened stood at 40%
(cf. Aa.Vv. 2012). However, considering the lack of linguistic features considered by
current definitions of ‘hate speech’, it is difficult identify them. Automatic detection and
censure of hate speeches is a sensible problem in relation to freedom of speech. The
vulgar and offensive meaning of hate speeches is not related to a referent, ontologically
located in the word and objectively identifiable by the participants to the communicative
process; hate speeches rather involve enunciation, and, in particular, the subjectivity of
the receiver.

1.1 The corpus

A possible solution is represented by the application of statistical methods to let emerge
the features of hate speeches directly from a corpus of messages. To this purpose, a
corpus has been collected by Berkeley D-Lab, thanks to the funding of the Anti-
Defamation League. The corpus counts 7619 posts on the social platform Reddit dating
back to the US Presidential Elections of 2016. The goal is to apply Machine Learning
techniques to this corpus, in order to recognize hate speeches without having to specify
their linguistic features. The corpus has been labeled by humans (trained students), and
411 texts have been considered ‘hate speeches’. The top 5 words used in the hate-
speeches subset are: Jews, White, Hate, Black, Women. Among these, white and black
are interesting because they can be considered an antonymic couple from the point of
view of lexical semantics.

1.2 Problems
The increasingly widespread use of neural networks and machine learning techniques in
the legal field raises ethical questions. It is a commonplace that machines are immune
from human biases; on the contrary, machines absorb biases from their corpus. Thus,
human responsibility is always questioned, as well as the possibility of manipulating
algorithms to reach ideological goals, presenting the decision of the machine as
‘objective’, using it to limit freedom and to delegitimise the political opponent’s point of
view.
A second threat is represented by ‘ethical outsourcing’. A characteristic of our time is to
delegate philosophy to machines. In fact, automatic ethical judgment is only the final
step after the success of aesthetic and ontological algorithms:

▪ we ask search engines to measure the relevance of images to our queries;

▪ we ask algorithms to report fake news: European Union financed a project
(https://askpinocchio.com/) that claims to assign a probability value to news on the
basis of a textual analysis, thus confusing the credibility of the lexicon with the reference
to a state of affairs.

However, when one asks if it is right to entrust moral judgment to Artificial

Intelligence, the problem is whether a not-human, artificially created ‘intelligence’ exists
or not. If we paraphrase the question into ‘it is right to entrust moral judgment to a new
statistical approach’, the debate would gain in clarity.

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1.3 Technical limitations

Finally, and most importantly, the actual automatic classification techniques based on
neural networks show important technical limitations. Neural Networks are less efficient
when the goal is to distinguish between a great number of classes; as a consequence,
Neural Networks find it hard to classify hate speeches in genres. In fact, hateful content
lacks of unequivocal linguistic features (Zhang & Luo 2018). As we said, ‘hate’ involves
the intersubjective dimension of enunciation: hate speeches show a philosophical
relevance.
This suggests a closer analysis to the immanent semantic features of the hate speech. On
this purpose, it is necessary to adopt a different technique, inspired to quantum
geometry, that will be presented in paragraph 2.

2. A quantum semantic memory

In the proposed model, the semantic dimension of the document will be considered as a
quantum semantic memory (QSM), which can be retrieved and modified by a quantum
logic unit (QLU). The QSM is a net of context-sensitive relations between lexemes.
These relations are weighted, and depend mainly on the distance between the two
considered lexemes. They are re-enforced whenever two lexemes co-occur more than
one time in the text. The weight of a relation plays the role of probability in the
quantum formalism. From this point of view, the text does not appear any more as a
discrete net of words, but as a geometrical space (the semantic space). The QLU is the
algorithm we use to transform the space in order to let emerge the stronger and the
weaker relations we are interested in. The QLU consists of operators, acting on the
semantic relations. The nature of these operators is logical, with particular reference to
quantum logic (see Dubois and Toffano 2017).
This model is consistent with the semiotic tradition. The notion of semantic memory
has been proposed firstly in the seminal works by Ross Quillian (1968), and it is the
basis of Umberto Eco’s notion of encyclopedic format (cf. Semantica della metafora, in
Eco 1972). Quillian’s model is deterministic, while posterior research turned its
attention towards probability, understood as a measure of the weight of semantic
relations. The present research is based on the model of semantic memory proposed by
Lund and Burgess (1996).
A detailed technical exposition of the quantum formalism applied to hate speeches has
been presented in Galofaro, Toffano, and Doan (2018). Here we will focus on
semiotics, in particular on structural semantics. We will describe step-by-step how our
algorithm works on a text belonging to our corpus:

That’s probably because 30 years ago they were not bashing black or women. Well,
women only got bashed if they mouthed off.

In our corpus, this text has been labeled as non-hate speech. It contains the words black
(B) and women (W), and it does not contain the word ‘white’.

2.2 From words to lexemes

The first step is to convert the text in a quantum semantic memory, using the HAL
method (cf. Lund and Burgess 1996). The method consists in producing a matrix whose
rows and columns represent the lexemes occurring in the text. We need to obtain the
lexemes from the words both for semantic and technical reasons: we want to avoid that
the computer considers the singular and the plural of a lexeme as two distinct words. To

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obtain this we apply a stemmer, a standard library of the python programming language
capable of reducing each word to a specific stem, similar to – but not coincident with –
the linguistic notion of root (e.g. black, blacks, blackness)1. There is a risk of
oversimplification, but every model has to renounce, in principle, to some information
to focus on structural phenomena.

2.3 The quantum semantic memory

We also set an optimal window, i.e. the length of the context we want to consider
(window). In the considered example, we consider a window of 11 word. By moving the
window lexeme by lexeme over the document we write in each square of the matrix a
number which is inversely proportional to the distance between the lexeme-row and the
lexeme-column. We finally sum the different occurrences of a lexeme: for example,
women occurs two times in our document. We can see the result in fig. 1:

Fig. 1 - A Quantum Semantic Memory

Fig. 1 represents the semantic space of the document. Each lexeme is represented as a
row and a column vector. In the figure we underlined two word-vectors (women and
black). The vectors represents the relations between these two lexemes and all the other
lexemes of the document, in each context provided by the document. They tell us
something (information) on the distribution of their meaning along the textual space. In
other terms, each of them represents an isotopy, defined as coherent semantic layers (cf.
Greimas 1966). As Guido Ferraro notices (2019: 66) the isotopic effect derives from the
structural oppositions on which it is actually based: every narration needs to oppose
values. For example, in a first document, black women can be considered the opposite
of white women; in a second speech black women can be considered as a subset of
black people. Thus, the semiotic square provides the basic oppositions we can find
between two textual isotopies: contradiction, implication, antonymy, sub-contrariety –
see Greimas and Rastier (1968). However, since we are interested in the isotopic
dissemination starting from any two lexemes, we are interesting in measuring the strength of
the considered opposition.

2.4 The big question

How to acquire information on the relation between the “black”-isotopy and on the
“women”-isotopy in the semantic space? First, we want to know whether they are
related or not. But, in a document all meanings are related. Thus, we are interested in

1 After different attempts we opted for Lancaster stemmer. Less aggressive libraries such as the Porter
stemmer still distinguish between singular and plural. We also eliminated every information manifested by
morphology, syntax, and punctuation.

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the weight of this relation. Second, we are interested in the type of semantic relation
between the two isotopies: are ‘black’ and ‘women’ opposed, as they were antomyms?
Does the text give them a similar meaning, as they were synonyms? Does the first
presuppose the second (or vice-versa)? Finally: where to find information to typify the
semantic relation?
The use of the term ‘antonym’ we made above might leave puzzled: ‘black’ and ‘women’
are not registered as antonyms in the dictionary. As we will make it clear, the text
constructs their opposition. This has been explained by Rastier (2009) as a transfer of
semantic values not belonging to the functional system of the language, but to other
systems, such as social or idiolectal norms (afferents semes). In our case, these values are
proper to specific political and sub-cultural groups.

2.5 Geometric transformations

The procedure to convert the information of the the semantic memory in a more
comfortable-to-retrieve format is reported in Galofaro, Toffano, and Doan (2018). Here
we will focus only on those features which seem more relevant to semantics. In fig.1 we
reported a formula that allows us to transform the semantic space in a single document
vector, |𝞧>. This vector, which represents the sum of all the isotopies, can be
expressed in different bases: in particular, we can choose the two lexemes we are
interested in as a base (fig. 2).

Fig. 2 – The same document |𝞧> can be expressed in the two different bases provided by the
keywords we are interested in (women Vs. black)

In fig. 2 we can see the same document-vector (|𝞧>) expressed in terms of its
respective projections on two different bases by the theorem of Pythagoras. The first
base is provided by the word-vector ‘black’ (|wA>) an by its orthogonal vector (|wA⟂>).
the second one is provided by the word-vector ‘woman’ (|wB⟂>) and by its orthogonal
vector.
2.6 Semantic interpretation of orthogonality
It has to be noticed how, when the ‘black’ component is at the maximum (when the
|𝞧> vector is parallel to the |wA> base), the value of the projection on (|wA⟂>) is 0
and vice versa. The same can be said about the base provided by the world-vector
‘woman’ and its orthogonal vector. Thus, we can interpret the orthogonal vector as
‘absence’ of semantic value (respectively: absence of ‘woman’, absence of ‘black’). This

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is consistent with Greimas definition of contradiction: the presence of one term

presupposes the absence of the other and vice-versa – see ‘contradiction’, ‘semiotic
square’ in Greimas and Courtés (1979).

3. The Quantum Logic Unit

To retrieve the Quantum Semantic Memory we need a Quantum Logic Unit: a set of
operators capable of transforming meaning. The next step will be:

▪ to transform the meaning of the document expressed on the black-base (|wA>);

▪ to transform the meaning of the document expressed on the women-base (|wB>);
▪ to measure the expected outcome when the two transformations are applied
together;

To construct our operators, we choose the X gate in quantum computation and we

define:

▪ the Bx operator, which inverts the black-related meanings in the document vector;
▪ the Wx operator, which inverts the women-related meanings in the document vector;

For example, in fig. 3, we represent how the Bx operator transforms the document-
vector, switching the α and the β component.

Fig. 3 - How the X operator transforms all the semantic values associated to the black-lexeme
by rotating the document vector

This is consistent with semiotic notion of meaning as transformation and of theory as

the rules of controlled transformations:

The construction of this space that we need will therefore coincide with the
theory itself, that is to say with all the constituent categories that are organized
in a structured system. Here, the structure is above all the organization of the
conditions of possibility of the phenomena, but it is revealed immediately [...]
as the scientific form of their description, the controlled form, by inter-
definition, of the necessary practice (and thus universal) which consists in
paraphrasing, repeating, transforming the given meaning into a new meaning
(Marsciani 2014).

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3.1 Expectations
What happens when we apply the two operators on the document at the same time?
There are three interesting scenarios:

1) Every time the first operator changes a lexeme (+1) the second operator changes the
same lexeme (+1). Every time the first machine leaves unchanged a lexeme (-1) the
second machine leaves it unchanged (-1). If we multiply the two outcomes (+1,+1) or (-
1,-1) we have an expectation value of +1: the two meanings /black/ and /women/ are
correlated in the document.
2) Every time the first machine changes a lexeme (+1) the second machine leaves it
lexeme unchanged (-1). Every time the first machine leaves unchanged a lexeme (-1) the
second machine changes it (+1). If we multiply the two outcomes (+1,-1) or (-1,+1) we
have an expectation value of -1: the two meanings /black/ and /women/ are anti-
correlated in the document.
3) The changes can be concomitant in some context while in others they are not
concomitant not (+1,+1); (+1,-1); (-1;+1). Their average is (0). Interpretation: the the
two meanings /black/ and /women/ are not correlated in the document.

Obviously, all the values between -1 and +1 are a measure of a stronger or a weaker
semantic (anti-)correlation. The expectation value is helpful to typify the semantic
relation we are interested in. It is possible to calculate it applying the Born rule:

〈𝞧|BxWx|𝞧〉

3.2 Bell Value

Beside Bx and Wx it is possible to define other operators starting from Pauli gates in
quantum computation. In particular, we are interested in Pauli Z-gate, since, with an
opportune choice of the operators, it is possible to calculate the Bell value (S). The
formula is presented and commented in Barros, Toffano, Meguebli, and Doan (2014).
As in quantum theory, the Bell value is less than or equal to 2 when there is a classical
correlation between the two lexemes; it is in the range of 2 to 2√2 (approximately 2,8)
when there is a quantum correlation.
In Quantum Information Retrieval, the variation of this value in relation to the
considered context has been considered a measure of the semantic relation between two
queries A and B (‘A in the sense of B’). Here we are going to consider a fixed window
and to compare the expectation value to the Bell value. Since we empirically measure
both classical and quantum correlation it becomes critical to provide a semantic
interpretation to the difference between the classical and the quantum correlation. We
will try to do that basing on our corpus of hate speeches.

4. Findings
As we wrote above, the correlation value allows us to typify the semantic correlation
between the two isotopies we are interested in, whereas the Bell value allows us to
distinguish between classical an quantum correlations. Basing on these two values, we
can distinguish four kinds of relations between isotopies in the considered hate
speeches:

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1 – Reciprocal presupposition. The two isotopies can be considered as one isotopy. The hate
speeches are featured by a weak, classic correlation (0 < C < 0.5, 0 < S < 1.4).
2 – Dominance. The presupposition is unidirectional (one of the two lexemes is
incidental). The hate speeches are featured by no correlation or a weak, classic
anticorrelation (-0.5 < C < 0, 0 < S < 1.4).
3 – Distinctiveness. The two isotopies are well individuated, and they do not overlap in the
considered hate speech. The hate speeches are featured by a strong, classic
anticorrelation (-0.7 < C < 0.5, 1.4 < S < 2).
4 – Allotopy. The two lexemes are allotopic: they simply do not share the same contexts.
They are strongly opposed. The hate speeches are featured by a strong, quantum
anticorrelation (-1 < C < 0.7, 2 < S < 2.8).

Interestingly, we found a link between the correlation value and the bell value, so that
only some strong anticorrelations violate the Bell inequality. This point will be discussed
below.

4.1 Reciprocal presupposition

The first discursive subset (fig. 4) corresponds to a weak classical correlation between
the two isotopies. This corresponds to a general topic of the hate speech where the two
lexemes represents two intersecting sets: for example, black women.

Correlation Bell Value Topic

Weak: Classic: Intersection of the two isotopies. Example: black women
0 < C < (-0.5) 0 < S < 1.4
Example: Based on the many, many videos I’ve watched of chimpouts, black women are more
aggressive and more violent than black men. They seem to think there are no consequences for
them when they punch other people in the face
Fig. 4 - first discursive subset of the hate speeches: intersection between isotopies (in the
example: black women)

The correlation value indicates the presence of a weak correlation between the two
terms. They are not used as synonyms; rather, there is a presuppositions in terms of
Greimas’ square. For example, the considered hate speech oppose black men to black
women, subdividing the presupposed black set in two presupposing subsets.

4.2 Dominance
The second discursive subset (fig. 5) corresponds to the absence of correlation or to the
presence of a weak anticorrelation between the two isotopies. The Bell value is still
classical and weak (S < 1.4). This corresponds to a general topic of the hate speech
where the one of the two lexeme dominates the other, which is used incidentally.

Correlation Bell Value Topic

No correlation or weak Classic: Dominance of one of the two isotopies.
anticorrelation 0 < S < 1.4 Example: women. Incidentally, white women
-0.5 < C < 0
Example: Those 20 women ought to be quarantined in a special zoo and denied treatment for
their HIV. Then every white woman should be forced to walk through that zoo to see those
women slowly die from race-treason. These whorish women need to be brought back into
line, they will be the death of our race.

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Fig. 5 - second discursive subset of the hate speeches: dominance (in the example: White and
Women)

The correlation value indicates the presence of no correlation or of a weak

anticorrelation between the two terms. They are not used as antonyms; rather, one of
them prevails on the other. For example, the considered hate speech speaks about
women. Incidentally, it makes references to white women.

4.3 Distinctiveness
The correlation value indicates the presence of a strong anticorrelation between the two
terms (Fig. 6). The Bell Value is higher than in the previous subsets, but it is still
classical (S < 2). There is no intersections between the two isotopies: they are well
individuated and kept distinct. For example, the considered hate speech accuses liberals
of partisanship about women and about black people speaks about women.

Correlation Bell Value Topic

Strong anticorrelation Classic: It rises from the distinctiveness of the two
-0.7 < C < 0.5 1.4 < S < 2 isotopies. Example: black people and women.
Example:
Liberals only teach the bad in American history. I had multiple teachers that told me that
slavery affects black people today and women only make 70 cents to a man. These are both
lies, and there is nothing taught about how we spread ideas of individual freedom across the
western world and gave more rights to women, minorities, plants and animals than any other,
all thanks to “racist slave holders” so yeah, teach slavery all you want, but also include the fact
that these ideas were not constitutional and mostly pushed by democrats.
Fig. 6 - third discursive subset of the hate speeches: distinctiveness (in the example, between
black people and women)

4.4 Allotopy
The last, very interesting case, is represented by the presence of the strongest
anticorrelation and a quantum Bell Value

Correlation Bell Value Topic

Strong anticorrelation Quantum: Is the result of the allotopic relation between
-1 < C < (-0.7) 2 < S < 2.8 the considered lexemes. Example: women Vs.
hate
Example:
>>>Glad you think a man raping a woman is an “equally likely scenario” as a woman
drunkenly hitting on and having sex with a man.

Fuck off, and take your hate elsewhere.

Edit: is this r/feminism now? Did no one read what this bitch wrote?

>>>But there is the equally likely scenario where the woman gets drunk, and a man steps in to
“take care of her”. Separates her from her friends, says he’ll walk her home.

Obvious man hater here.

Fig. 7 - fourth discursive subset of the hate speeches: (in the example: women vs. hate)

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The example is very interesting too, since the writer ‘quotes’ the discourse of the
interlocutor. The first focus on hate (‘take your hate elsewere’, ‘man hater here’, while
the second focus on women and men). The lexemes ‘women’ and ‘hate’ are allotopic:
they do not share the same contexts.

5. Discussion
The particular link we found between correlation and bell value probably depends on
the features of the textual genre we analyzed: hate speeches are indeed short, lexically
poor, violently opposing two or three terms. Thus, further research is needed to fully
understand whether the typology we individuated is complete and relevant to other
textual genres. For example, strong positive correlations are not present in the corpus;
this does not mean that they are not possible. Furthermore, a comparison between hate
and non-hate speeches could lead to a better understanding of the difference between
them.
a better understanding of the difference hate/non hate speeches;
An interesting point concerns Quantum anticorrelations, because they suggest that
formal semantic models should be weaker than classical logic. In fact, comparison to
ordinary logic, quantum logic is an extended system (Von Neumann 1932:253). For
example, let us see another hate speech, opposing white (men) to (feminist) women and
to Black (table 8):

Correlation Bell Value Topic

Strong anticorrelation Quantum: Women is opposed Black
-1 < C < (-0.7) 2 < S < 2.8 Black is opposed to White
White is opposed to Women
Example: Sometimes I feel like those movements became obsolete the moment women got
equal rights with men and people stopped thinking about blacks as of inferior race. Now they
just keep momentum, turning women and minorities into privileged classes.
If they keep this up in a few decades we would *need* MRA and white rights activists.
Fig. 8 - In this text we find a strong anti-correlation between Women, Black, and White
respectively. At the same time, all the considered relations violate Bell inequality

Our algorithm registers three strong quantum anti-correlations: white/men,

white/women, women/black, which seems adequate to our interpretation of the
message. However, this seems a violation of first order propositional logic. In fact, in
classical logic, (a) is a tautology:

a)

Let A = the ‘women’ isotopy, B = the ‘white’ isotopy, and C = the ‘Black’ isotopy.
Thus, “if (Women iff not White) and (White iff not Black) then (Women iff White)” is
always true. We could call this rule ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ In our case,
this would imply that women and black would be somehow correlated isotopies: this
does not happen in the considered texts, where the three lexemes are respectively
allotopic and /women/ and /black/ produce non overlapping isotopies. The reason of
the difference between quantum anti-correlation and classical logic consists in the
geometry of the considered space. In Galofaro, Toffano, and Doan (2018) we
demonstrated how anti-correlation is related to the angle between the base-vectors of

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the query. Roughly speaking, “being anti-correlated” equals to “being orthogonal”, and
“being correlated” equals to “being parallel”. Let us interpret (a) in geometrical terms:

b) If “Women” is orthogonal to “White” and “White” is orthogonal to “Black”, then

“Black” is parallel (and, a fortiori, not orthogonal) to “Women”;

The sentence (b) would be true in a two-dimensional semantic space. In our space, each
vector of the document (white, women, black ...) lays in a different dimension, since
they are all orthogonal. Thus, if all the three base-vector are anti-correlated, we can
represent them as in Fig. 9.

Fig. 9 - A geometrical interpretation of anti-correlation in a 2D and in a 3D space

6. Open questions
Why semantic space should be represented as the same space of quantum computation
and quantum physics? Jean Petitot formulated the problem in this way:

Many people are using quantum formalisms beyond physics but it is in general
difficult to justify the Hilbert structure (in particular complex coefficients with
phase factors necessary for interferences) (Petitot, personal communication, 2018).

The first answer could have been: whatever works. Or: mathematics is just a formal
model, the fact that a portion of semantics and physics can be formalized using the
same tools does not suggest any ontological relation between the two. To paraphrase
non-realist interpretations of quantum logic – see Wilce (2017) – quantum semantics is
a theory about the possible statistical distributions of lexemes in certain contexts, and its
non-classical “logic” simply reflects the fact that these distributions can not be present
simultaneously anywhere in the text. Because of this, the set of propositions on
isotopies is less rich than it would be in classical probability theory, and the set of
possible statistical distributions, accordingly, less tightly constrained, allowing cases as
the one we reported in the previous paragraph. That some “non-classical” probability
distributions allowed by this theory are actually manifested in nature is perhaps
surprising, but in no way requires any revision of the semantics of the language we use
to make reference to nature.

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6.1 Semantics and Quantum information

However, there is another possible explanation. The point is the kernel notion of
information: in particular, Von Neumann entropy. Just as Shannon entropy measures
the amount of order in a classical system, von Neumann entropy measures order in a
given quantum system. Von Neumann information is calculated by calculating the
eigenvalues of a density matrix where we store the α, β, γ, and δ components of the
document vector |𝞧> expressed in the two different bases provided by the two
lexemes we are interested in (Yanowski and Iannucci 2008 : 288-295).
According to this point, when we measure the expectation that two lexemes are related
in the same contexts, we are not ‘understanding’ the text. The same reason led Umberto
Eco (1962) to understand that Information Theory did not provide a complete
foundation for aesthetics, and to start his research on semiotics. We could do the same
operation with an undeciphered writing, such as a linear A tablet. We are only acquiring
information on semantics, i.e. on the relation between certain words. For example, this
way we can understand that ‘schtroumpf’ is the opposite of a ‘schroumpfette’, without
actually knowing what a ‘schtroumpf’ is. However, this would be very helpful to decode
an encrypted message. Further researches on the density operator are needed to a better
understanding of the problem formulated by Petitot.

7. Conclusion
Quantum semantics tries to merge a structural notion of value as difference with a
phenomenological notion of value resulting from the intentional relation between
subject and object (inherence, cf. Marsciani 2014). In fact, the model foresees two levels
(Fig. 9):

Fig. 9 - A two-level model

According to the model, meaning is produced by the relations between world-vectors in

the semantic space of the document, but only in so far as it is observable. The observer
interacts with the document transforming it and progressively determining it: meaning is
transformation.

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