Srujana Merugu


2023

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Automated Digitization of Unstructured Medical Prescriptions
Megha Sharma | Tushar Vatsal | Srujana Merugu | Aruna Rajan
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)

Automated digitization of prescription images is a critical prerequisite to scale digital healthcare services such as online pharmacies. This is challenging in emerging markets since prescriptions are not digitized at source and patients lack the medical expertise to interpret prescriptions to place orders. In this paper, we present prescription digitization system for online medicine ordering built with minimal supervision. Our system uses a modular pipeline comprising a mix of ML and rule-based components for (a) image to text extraction, (b) segmentation into blocks and medication items, (c) medication attribute extraction, (d) matching against medicine catalog, and (e) shopping cart building. Our approach efficiently utilizes multiple signals like layout, medical ontologies, and semantic embeddings via LayoutLMv2 model to yield substantial improvement relative to strong baselines on medication attribute extraction. Our pipeline achieves +5.9% gain in precision@3 and +5.6% in recall@3 over catalog-based fuzzy matching baseline for shopping cart building for printed prescriptions.

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CoMix: Guide Transformers to Code-Mix using POS structure and Phonetics
Gaurav Arora | Srujana Merugu | Vivek Sembium
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Code-mixing is ubiquitous in multilingual societies, which makes it vital to build models for code-mixed data to power human language interfaces. Existing multilingual transformer models trained on pure corpora lack the ability to intermix words of one language into the structure of another. These models are also not robust to orthographic variations. We propose CoMixCoMix is not a trademark and only used to refer to our models for code-mixed data for presentational brevity., a pretraining approach to improve representation of code-mixed data in transformer models by incorporating phonetic signals, a modified attention mechanism, and weak supervision guided generation by parts-of-speech constraints. We show that CoMix improves performance across four code-mixed tasks: machine translation, sequence classification, named entity recognition (NER), and abstractive summarization. It also achieves the new SOTA performance for English-Hinglish translation and NER on LINCE Leaderboard and provides better generalization on out-of-domain translation. Motivated by variations in human annotations, we also propose a new family of metrics based on phonetics and demonstrate that the phonetic variant of BLEU correlates better with human judgement than BLEU on code-mixed text.