Artificial intelligences have difficulty thinking
AI and… AI
Eric Brunelle, original designer of Antidote, assures in a press release that he wants to develop this new technology. For this purpose, the rewrite option is offered free of charge to users of Antidote + or Antidote Web in the form of a beta version and users are invited to send their comments to the developers. Note that users of the bilingual version of Antidote can benefit from this functionality in both French and English.
On the Montreal-based company's blog, two specialists from Eric Brunelle's team explain how this further development of the spell checker works. Jasmin Lapalme, one of the pilots of the generative artificial intelligence tool, points out that the Antidote teams use three types of artificial intelligence.
There is a symbolic AI that works based on rules, conditions and decision trees, for example, determining the subject of a sentence, determining its number and validating the agreement of the verb. The new tools also use statistical AI that analyzes collected data packets, commonly called big data, and extracts trends from them. “Large”? “For Antidote, Big Data takes the form of a corpus of 6 billion words or 270 million sentences that we have created from thousands of different and reliable sources such as journalistic websites or digital libraries,” explain the specialists.
Finally, there is neural AI, which uses machine learning principles and leads to linguistic formulation, as ChatGPT does. A technique implemented in Antidote since 2021.
A certain character
For Maud Pironneau, who delves into this last aspect in more detail in a team of around thirty people, the advantage of a limited corpus and analysis of user texts is that the proposed rewrite remains faithful to the editor's ideas and his writing style. Note that Antidote's generative tool is effectively only accessible via the web interface, as the required computing power is available in the cloud.