Application of Quantum Theory to Partial Retrieval of Online Course Materials

2018 Fiscal Year Annual Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 16K00498
• Research Institution: Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts
• Principal Investigator: Pradhan SujeetR 倉敷芸術科学大学, 危機管理学部, 教授 (90320001)
• Project Period (FY): 2016-04-01 – 2019-03-31
• Keywords: online materials / linear algebra / quantum mechanics / information retrieval / uncertainty / interactive system

Outline of Annual Research Achievements

In this study, a formal framework for an information system based on the theories of quantum mechanics, designed to organize and retrieve online teaching materials was investigated. In this framework, online teaching materials consisting information in heterogeneous formats such as books, slides, images, and video, are broken into smaller quantum such as pages, individual slides, video shots, each of which may be a target of retrieval as a single entity or as a part of a larger collection of entities. Furthermore, a target retrieval may comprise a singular media or a mixture of interrelated media. For example, a typical retrieval may consist of a section of consecutive presentation slides and a section of video that is associated with the slides.
Each entities are represented in a multidimensional Hilbert space based on its characteristics vectors. Users can interact with the system by querying materials and further improvising the retrieval answers by providing either feedback or modifying the initial query. The system is expected to evolve over time to provide a better personalized answers in future.
Although, information retrieval systems based on quantum mechanics seem to have as solid theoretical ground, several issues regarding its implementation such as 1) necessity of a large index space, 2) time complexity of query processing, were identified during the study period. These observations should be useful for future work on quantum-based information retrieval systems.