@inproceedings{chen-etal-2023-rare,
    title = "Rare Codes Count: Mining Inter-code Relations for Long-tail Clinical Text Classification",
    author = "Chen, Jiamin  and
      Li, Xuhong  and
      Xi, Junting  and
      Yu, Lei  and
      Xiong, Haoyi",
    editor = "Naumann, Tristan  and
      Ben Abacha, Asma  and
      Bethard, Steven  and
      Roberts, Kirk  and
      Rumshisky, Anna",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 5th Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.clinicalnlp-1.43",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.clinicalnlp-1.43",
    pages = "403--413",
    abstract = "Multi-label clinical text classification, such as automatic ICD coding, has always been a challenging subject in Natural Language Processing, due to its long, domain-specific documents and long-tail distribution over a large label set. Existing methods adopt different model architectures to encode the clinical notes. Whereas without digging out the useful connections between labels, the model presents a huge gap in predicting performances between rare and frequent codes. In this work, we propose a novel method for further mining the helpful relations between different codes via a relation-enhanced code encoder to improve the rare code performance. Starting from the simple code descriptions, the model reaches comparable, even better performances than models with heavy external knowledge. Our proposed method is evaluated on MIMIC-III, a common dataset in the medical domain. It outperforms the previous state-of-art models on both overall metrics and rare code performances. Moreover, the interpretation results further prove the effectiveness of our methods. Our code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/jiaminchen-1031/Rare-ICD}.",
}

Multi-label clinical text classification, such as automatic ICD coding, has always been a challenging subject in Natural Language Processing, due to its long, domain-specific documents and long-tail distribution over a large label set. Existing methods adopt different model architectures to encode the clinical notes. Whereas without digging out the useful connections between labels, the model presents a huge gap in predicting performances between rare and frequent codes. In this work, we propose a novel method for further mining the helpful relations between different codes via a relation-enhanced code encoder to improve the rare code performance. Starting from the simple code descriptions, the model reaches comparable, even better performances than models with heavy external knowledge. Our proposed method is evaluated on MIMIC-III, a common dataset in the medical domain. It outperforms the previous state-of-art models on both overall metrics and rare code performances. Moreover, the interpretation results further prove the effectiveness of our methods. Our code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/jiaminchen-1031/Rare-ICD}.
Chen, Jiamin Li, Xuhong Xi, Junting Yu, Lei Xiong, Haoyi
Rare Codes Count: Mining Inter-code Relations for Long-tail Clinical Text Classification