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8n4vidtmkvmktoday at 5:02 PM3 repliesview on HN

Just curious, why are drug names such a disaster? Do LLMs not understand pronunciation keys?


Replies

Polizeiposaunetoday at 5:44 PM

Trademarks.

And the patients generally don't have a pronunciation key. Doctors prescribing might not, either.

munk-atoday at 5:23 PM

Drug names are frequently BS loaded with strange consonants without singular pronunciation guidelines (sadly English isn't German) so humans already have a lot of variation in how things are pronounced - models then need to comprehend those variations, regional dialects (like those fuggin' ahs from Boston).

It ends up being quite a lot of variation.

As some examples: Wegovy, Ixempra, Qvar, Keflex

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thunderforktoday at 5:17 PM

People pronounce drug names all sorts of ways, and there's a lot of them (with a steady trickle of new ones)