Shruti Joshi Is Awarded the Ninth Antidote Scholarship in Natural Language Processing

Druide informatique is pleased to announce that the recipient of the ninth Antidote Scholarship in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is Shruti Joshi, a PhD student working under the supervision of Professor Dhanya Sridhar in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO) at Université de Montréal and Mila—Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute. Totalling $20,000, the Antidote Scholarship in NLP is endowed by the Druide Fund for Research in Text Analysis, created through a donation from Druide informatique to Université de Montréal.

Joshi’s work focuses on developing interpretation, control and reliability methods for large language models (LLMs). She created the Sparse Shift Autoencoder method, which helps control LLM activations in order to reduce bias in the generated texts, among other things. Before joining Professor Sridhar’s team, Joshi was a research programmer at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen, Germany, where she contributed to various publications on modular neural architectures.

The Antidote Scholarship in NLP is awarded each year to a student in Université de Montréal’s DIRO whose work is affiliated with Mila. The scholarship comes from the $1 million 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. Its corrector, guides and dictionaries have since benefited from nearly 30 years of technological and linguistic development. Today, over a million people use Antidote both in English and French, and Druide continues to diligently develop the software. In fact, Antidote 12 includes a generative reformulation engine based on an LLM that was boosted by multiple free updates this year.

Druide informatique has been specializing in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics since 1993. The company produces and markets Antidote, the most comprehensive writing assistance software available for English and French, as well as Typing Pal, the renowned typing tutorial application. In addition to its software, Druide also publishes French-language literature and reference works through its subsidiary, Éditions Druide.