BERT for Long Documents: A Case Study of Automated ICD Coding

4 Nov 2022 · Arash Afkanpour, Shabir Adeel, Hansenclever Bassani, Arkady Epshteyn, Hongbo Fan, Isaac Jones, Mahan Malihi, Adrian Nauth, Raj Sinha, Sanjana Woonna, Shiva Zamani, Elli Kanal, Mikhail Fomitchev, Donny Cheung ·

Transformer models have achieved great success across many NLP problems. However, previous studies in automated ICD coding concluded that these models fail to outperform some of the earlier solutions such as CNN-based models. In this paper we challenge this conclusion. We present a simple and scalable method to process long text with the existing transformer models such as BERT. We show that this method significantly improves the previous results reported for transformer models in ICD coding, and is able to outperform one of the prominent CNN-based methods.

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