@inproceedings{liu-nguyen-2026-bridging,
    title = "Bridging the Version Gap: Multi-version Training Improves {ICD} Code Prediction, Especially for Rare Codes",
    author = "Liu, Jinghui  and
      Nguyen, Anthony",
    editor = "Demner-Fushman, Dina  and
      Ananiadou, Sophia  and
      Roberts, Kirk  and
      Tsujii, Junichi",
    booktitle = "{B}io{NLP} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.bionlp-1.29/",
    pages = "372--381",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-434-7",
    abstract = "Clinical coding maps clinical documentation to standardized medical codes, an essential yet time-consuming administrative task that could benefit from automation. Current models on ICD coding are typically optimized for codes from a specific ICD version. However, in reality, ICD systems evolve continuously, and different versions are adopted across time periods and regions. Moreover, ICD coding suffers from the long-tail problem, and rare code performance can be a bottleneck for developing implementable models. We examine whether it is viable to train version-independent models by combining data annotated in different ICD versions, which may help address these challenges. We add ICD-9 data to the training of a modified label-wise attention model for ICD-10 prediction, and find that despite the version mismatch, adding ICD-9 yields a 27{\%} increase in micro F1 for 18K rare ICD codes compared to training on ICD-10 alone. On 8K frequent ICD-10 codes, the multi-version training also substantially improves macro metrics, with far fewer model parameters."
}