Commentary on Quantum-Inspired Information Retrieval

There have been suggestions within the Information Retrieval (IR) community that quantum mechanics (QM) can be used to help formalise the foundations of IR. The invoked connection to QM is mathematical rather than physical. The proposed ideas are concerned with information which is encoded, processed and accessed in classical computers. However, some of the suggestions have been thoroughly muddled with questions about applying techniques of quantum information theory in IR, and it is often unclear whether or not the suggestion is to perform actual quantum information processing on the information. This paper is an attempt to provide some conceptual clarity on the emerging issues.