# PharmMT: A Neural Machine Translation Approach to Simplify Prescription Directions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.03830 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03830/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08746/) (2019)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [Convolutional Sequence to Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03122/) (2017)
- [ClinicalBERT: Modeling Clinical Notes and Predicting Hospital Readmission](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05342/) (2019)
- [OpenNMT: Open-source Toolkit for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.03815/) (2017)
- [A Critical Review of Recurrent Neural Networks for Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.00019/) (2015)
- [Fully Character-Level Neural Machine Translation without Explicit Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.03017/) (2016)
- [OpenNMT: Neural Machine Translation Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11462/) (2018)
- [Neural Machine Translation and Sequence-to-sequence Models: A Tutorial](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01619/) (2017)
- [Deep Architectures for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07631/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Retrieval augmentation of large language models for lay language generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03818/) (2022)
- [From Triage to Discharge: A Survey of NLP Tasks, Methods, and Open Challenges in the Emergency Department](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23627/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The language used by physicians and health professionals in prescription directions includes medical jargon and implicit directives and causes much confusion among patients. Human intervention to simplify the language at the pharmacies may introduce additional errors that can lead to potentially severe health outcomes. We propose a novel machine translation-based approach, PharmMT, to automatically and reliably simplify prescription directions into patient-friendly language, thereby significantly reducing pharmacist workload. We evaluate the proposed approach over a dataset consisting of over 530K prescriptions obtained from a large mail-order pharmacy. The end-to-end system achieves a BLEU score of 60.27 against the reference directions generated by pharmacists, a 39.6% relative improvement over the rule-based normalization. Pharmacists judged 94.3% of the simplified directions as usable as-is or with minimal changes. This work demonstrates the feasibility of a machine translation-based tool for simplifying prescription directions in real-life.