Arian Hosseini Is Awarded the Seventh Antidote Scholarship in Natural Language Processing

Druide informatique is pleased to announce that Arian Hosseini is the recipient of the seventh Antidote scholarship in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Hosseini is a PhD student under the supervision of Professor Aaron Courville at Mila—Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute. Totaling $20,000, the Antidote Scholarship in NLP is awarded from the Druide Fund for Research in Text Analysis, created through a donation from Druide informatique to the Université de Montréal.

Hosseini’s work focuses on language models and their generalization properties, particularly on understanding in large language models (LLM) and on improving their capacity for reasoning through in-context learning. These models are opening new avenues for text comprehension and generation, as reported recently in the media.

The Antidote Scholarship in NLP is awarded each year to a student in the Université de Montréal’s Department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO) whose work is affiliated with Mila. The scholarship comes from the one-million-dollar Druide Fund for Research in Text Analysis, which was established to celebrate both Antidote’s 20th anniversary and DIRO’s 50th anniversary.

Launched in 1996, Antidote was a trailblazer in integrating artificial intelligence into a software application for the general public. Its corrector, guides and dictionaries have since benefited from more than 25 years of persistent technological and linguistic development. Today, over a million people use Antidote both in English and French, and Druide continues to diligently develop the software. Launched in October 2021, Antidote 11 integrates deep learning for the first time, both in its neural correction engine and to provide pronunciations of each word in both languages and in different accents.