Hey, I am Supriya Khadka!

Hello, I am Supriya!


I am a Postgraduate Researcher, currently pursuing Master in Science by Research (MRes/MSCR) at the Research Centre for Computational Science & Mathematical Modelling at Coventry University, UK. My research, supervised by Dr. Xiaorui Jiang, Dr. Pengpeng Hu, and Prof. Vasile Palade, focuses on Lowering the Cost of Healthcare by Clinical Coding with LLMs. I am honoured to receive the British Council Women in STEM Scholarship 2024, which supports this research and my degree at Coventry.

I love going on hikes, even though my body gives up almost instantly when climbing uphill. I also love buying novels, reading novels and talking about novels in my free time. I also enjoy watching live theatre, movies and series. If you want to talk about NLP, books or movies, hit me up!

Portfolio

Nepali Text-to-Speech System

Natural sounding Nepali Text-to-Speech system. Finetuned on our own data, available here.

Built using Tacotron-2 architecture (for spectrogram generation) and Hifi-GAN and WaveGlow (for vocoder), all of which implemented in PyTorch.

Paper | Audio Samples | Code(App) | Code(Model)

NepaliXlit

Adaptation of IndicXlit for Nepali systems. Prepared a parallel corpus of ~3500 romanized-nepali words, incorporating the nuances of Nepali conversational styles

Finetuned using fairseq with an incremental approach, finally obtaining Top@5 accuracy of 86% in the third iteration.

Inference Code | Training Code | Blog

Gender Bias in Nepali-English Machine Translation

Evaluated Gender Bias in Ne-En MT, comparing LLMs and existing machine translation systems.

Adapted three benchmarks and assessed gender bias in Ne-En machine translation for gender-neutral and gender-specific contexts.

Code & Data | Paper

NepaliSense DistillBERT

A Nepali variant of DistillBERT for sentence embeddings, inspired from Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation.

Utilized a student-teacher model requiring a parallel Nepali-English corpus for training. Training data was sourced from the TED2020 corpus.

View Code

OnlineKhabar Knowledge Graph

A Knowledge Graph made out of articles from the business section of Online Khabar - English

Built using BeautifulSoup (for scraping), spaCy (for Entity Pair and Relation/ Predicate Extraction) and networkx (for the knowledge graph).

View Code

Professional Experiences

Postgraduate Researcher
Coventry University (September 2024 - present)
  • Investigating generalization of biomedical pre-trained language models in clinical coding.
  • Researching Large Language Models zero-shot and few-shot setups for explainability of clinical codes.
  • Analyzing performance and cost-effectiveness of different few-shot learning strategies for adapting pre-trained and large language models to the clinical coding task.
Conversational AI Engineer
Diyo.AI (May 2023 - August 2024)
  • Building multilingual chatbots tailored for domains such as sexual and maternal reproductive health, safe abortion, e-governance, and sales.
  • Researching and implementing large language models like GPT3.5, Llama2, BLOOM and Okapi to develop and improve conversational models and their language understanding capability for low resource languages like Nepali
  • Analyzing user feedback and data to refine and optimize chatbot performance iteratively.
  • Successfully pitched about Diyo.AI at ICT Startup Awards 2023, securing a place in the top 5 finalists.
Computer Vision Research Engineer
Rara Labs (Jan 2023 - Mar 2023) (Contract)
  • Worked on the discovery phase of implementing AI for NWash, a project initiated by the Ministry of Water Supply, Nepal in collaboration with the British Embassy, Frontier Tech and Rara Labs.
  • Successfully implemented object detection and recognition algorithms on the dataset collected through the NWash Project, seamlessly integrating them with a web application.
  • Conducted extensive research on computer vision algorithms like YOLO and R-CNN to identify the most suitable solutions based on the NWash dataset requirements.
Technical Facilitator
Women Leaders in Technology (Sept 2020 - Nov 2023)
  • Served as a Technical Facilitator for three consecutive batches of a fellowship program aimed at empowering women leaders in technology
  • Instructed over 50 fellows in essential technical subjects, including Git, Basic JavaScript concepts, Asynchronous JavaScript concepts, Express, and MongoDB , during the fellowship bootcamp.
  • Promoted to the Technical Lead in the latest batch, overseeing all technical sessions and projects, and teaching approximately half of the classes throughout the duration of the fellowship.

Internships

NLP Research Intern
NAAMII (Oct 2022 - Apr 2023)
  • Researched the work done in Nepali NLP (Text Summarization, Nepali Transliteration and Nepali Text-to-Speech) under the supervision of Dr. Bishesh Khanal.
  • Curated Nepali NLP datasets with the study of their features and limitations (Sentiment Analysis, Nepali Text-to-Speech and Machine Translation).
Research and Development Intern
CARD (Jul 2022 - May 2023)
  • Researched on Nepali Text-to-Speech Synthesis under the supervision of Dr. Basanta Joshi at the Center for Applied Research and Development (CARD) at the Institute of Engineering, Pulchowk Campus.
  • Prepared a comprehensive Text-to-Speech dataset for the Nepali language and made it publicly available on OpenSLR.
  • Conducted numerous experiments with multiple models and speech synthesis techniques, and integrated the best result into a mobile application.
  • Published our work at the 2nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Under-resourced Languages(SIGUL 2023), a Satellite Workshop of Interspeech 2023 (Khadka et al.).
Project Intern
LIS Nepal Pvt. Ltd (Aug 2022 - Jan 2023)
  • Major Project Mentorship
  • Was a part of Data engineering BootCamp, where I learnt SQL, ETL Framework
  • Did a final presentation updating the project progress
React Intern
Sochware (May 2021 - June 2021)
  • Learned important concepts of React Hooks and Redux
  • Worked on 'Krishiware', an app to ease the work of farmers in Nepal
  • Built the validation and some parts of the dashboard using React and did state management with Redux

Volunteer Experiences

Planning Coordinator
Github Field Day Nepal 2022 & 2023
  • Part of the Organizing Committee of the first and second GitHub Field Day in Nepal
  • Responsible for Planning the Main Event
  • Responsible for Pre-event and Event Day Coordination
  • Managed Selected and Waitlisted Applicants
Event Manager
Hult Prize at IOE, Pulchowk Campus 2022
  • Part of one of the top on-campus programs in the Central Asia Region
  • Organized 4 physical orientations and three virtual orientations for 12 colleges
  • Organized 4 entrepreneurship talk series and two workshops for 600+ participants in total
  • Organized 2 mentorship sessions for 47 semifinalists and 18 finalists respectively
  • Interviewed more that 70 applicants for the position of Campus Representatives and Volunteers
Technical Manager (September 2020 - June 2022)
Pulchowk Girls
  • Responsible for managing technical aspects in webinars
  • Designed flyers, t-shirts and tokens of love for all events
  • Managed mass-mailing for each event
  • Organized 3 webinars, "International Day of Girl Child" Themed Art Competition, and a movement to improve Ladies Washroom in Pulchowk Campus
  • Prepared Sanitation Survey Report for Ladies Washroom Improvement Campaign
  • Managed three technical coordinators, who were part of the Technical Team
WLiT Fellow 2020/21
Women Leaders in Technology
  • Was selected as one of the 15 fellows from 99 applicants for the year 2020/21
  • Attended two-weeks long bootcamp on javascript, Node.js, MongoDB; built a project and presented at the end
  • Conducted an Hour of Code session with about 40 school students
  • Attended two monthly meetups each month
  • Completed six hours of mentorship sessions in a span of 6 months
  • Finished a two-month long internship as React Intern at Sochware
Editor
The Zerone Magazine
  • Served as the editor, associate editor, and managing editor for the Electronics and Computer Engineering department magazine, The Zerone, in the years 2019, 2020, and 2023, respectively.
  • Responsible for managing junior editors and editing, proofreading, shortlisting incoming articles.
Contributor
Nepal Online School
  • One of the many contributors to have helped build Nepal Online School
  • Made over 20 videos of subjects like science, health and moral education which is up on Nepal Online School's youtube channel.
  • Member of Girls in Education(GIE), an organization of all the female contributors of Nepal Online School
President
St.Xavier's Literary Club, 2018
  • In charge of organizing and conducting the club meetings
  • Coordinated with the administration, club moderators and members for organizing any event
  • Head of the selection committee; supervised the auditions and monitored the time table of every event
  • Successfully organized four club events including Kavi Gosthi, the most awaited event of the year

Scholarships and Awards

Award/Scholarship Awarded By Year
British Council Women in STEM Scholarship British Council 2024
Ncell Excellence Scholarship - Yearwise Top Female Student (4 times winner) Ncell 2019-2023
1st Runner Up - Gritfeat AI Health Hackathon Gritfeat 2023
1st Runner Up - Hackathon for HealthCare BPKHIS and GDHUB 2022
2nd Runner Up - OpenIMIS Datathon Asia eHealth Network and IOE, Pulchowk Campus 2022
Hack-A-Week Winner (Category - FinTech) LOCUS 2022
Full Scholarship Recipient of NAAMII Winter School of AI, 2021 NAAMII 2022
Grace Hopper Celebration Student Scholar AnitaB.org 2021
Women Leaders in Technology Fellowship 2020/21 WLiT Nepal 2020
Rajan Karki Memorial Outstanding Student Award St. Xavier's College, Maitighar 2018

Blogs

...
Her Hair

I have had short hair, almost all my adult life, and my choice of clothes are not exactly feminine.

October 8, 2020 Read More
...
A Ray of Reverie

From the beginning, I knew the watchman was evil, and the maid who came to cook and clean every two days wanted to kill me.

August 31, 2020 Read More
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Lucid Dreams

A bustling evening in Kathmandu with the sun setting down the sky in the backdrop; a chilly breeze brushing our face as we were walking down the streets of Maitighar.

December 20, 2019 Read More
...
My Ride Back Home

The most difficult and yet the most enthralling part about a ‘college day’ is my ride back home. The most convenient vehicle to reach my home is a mini bus which we call ‘force gaadi’ in our area.

November 14, 2018 Read More
Originally published in The Kathmandu Post
...
Beyond Just Blind Faith

My family had a very special Mother’s Day this year because we had our grandmother with us. Early in the morning, after exchanging tika, gifts and blessings, we were ready for some snaps.

May 23, 2018 Read More
Originally published in The Kathmandu Post
...
The Fairy Tale Bliss

Any kind of imagination fascinates me. Perception and outlook that are different than my own easily mesmerise me.

June 21, 2017 Read More
Originally published in The Kathmandu Post
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A Venture into my Kitchen

10th of Baishakh, a day before Matatirtha Aaushi, I announced, "Tomorrow, I am going to cook lunch for everyone." This announcement might be a normal one in any household, but it was enough to shock everyone in mine.

August 22, 2020 Read More
Originally published in zeronemag.com
(The New Normal Series)