alpha-id/docs/glossary.md

Glossary

Canonical nomenclature for alpha-id. This file is the source of truth for the project's terminology: where any other document names a concept differently, the canonical entry here — and its Avoid list — wins. Each block is a canonical term, an Avoid line of synonyms not to use, and a definition of at most two sentences. (Canonical terms are English, per the repo-English rule; the spec's German prose forms appear as synonyms to avoid.)

alpha-id

Avoid: — The Rust tool and CLI binary that turns caller-extracted diagnostic phrases into a ranked list of ICD-10-GM code suggestions. Distinct from Alpha-ID, the upstream data source it consumes.

Alpha-ID

Avoid: — The BfArM Alpha-ID dataset mapping free-text diagnosis phrases to ICD-10-GM codes; the source of the match corpus. Distinct from alpha-id, the tool that consumes it.

extracted phrase

Avoid: segment, unit, Einheit, Formulierung One caller-extracted diagnostic phrase (one input line) — the unit that is matched and ranked. In source code this concept is carried by the identifier segment (e.g. split_segments, source_segments), which is retained as a code term only.

Mode C

Avoid: Modus C The lexical-baseline retrieval mode: BM25 over the corpus plus tag filtering, with no IONOS calls. Also the degrade target for Mode A.

Mode A

Avoid: Modus A, semantic mode The hybrid retrieval mode: lexical and semantic (IONOS embedding) pools fused via RRF, then cross-encoder reranked. Degrades to Mode C on any IONOS failure.

billable

Avoid: abrechenbar, Abrechenbarkeit An ICD code marked Para295 == "P" in ClaML, i.e. valid as a standalone billing diagnosis. The --billable-only filter and the BillableRecall@10 metric key off this tag.

ClaML

Avoid: — The Classification Markup Language XML distribution of ICD-10-GM, parsed for code metadata (chapter, billability, descriptions) and for modifier expansion.

modifier expansion

Avoid: subclassification, Subklassifikation The ClaML process of generating terminal sub-digit codes (e.g. E11.90) by applying <ModifierClass> definitions, referenced via <ModifiedBy>, to a parent category. Produces the synthesized billable leaf codes the corpus matches against.

RRF

Avoid: — Reciprocal Rank Fusion: the rank-based method that merges the lexical and semantic candidate lists into one fused pool in Mode A.

rerank

Avoid: — The Mode A cross-encoder step that rescores the fused candidate pool against the query phrase, using the IONOS reranker model.

corpus

Avoid: Korpus, match corpus The set of Alpha-ID phrase entries that retrieval matches against.

embedding store

Avoid: embedding cache The per-phrase, content-hash-keyed persistent store of corpus embeddings under index/. Resumable, so an interrupted full embedding run can be continued.

vector index

Avoid: ANN index The in-RAM matrix of corpus embeddings searched by exact cosine similarity for the semantic pool. Built only when every corpus entry has a cached embedding; otherwise Mode A degrades.

degrade

Avoid: — Mode A falling back to Mode C when any IONOS step fails (embed, rerank, or a missing vector index); the request is still answered and degraded is set in diagnostics. Distinct from the 5-char-parent lookup fallback in meta_lookup.

tag filter

Avoid: — The predicate that drops suggestions by their tags — billable_only, valid_only, exclude_exotic, and chapters — applied after ranking and before truncating to the top-k.

eval harness

Avoid: — The offline evaluation that injects transcription errors into known billable phrases and measures whether the true code returns in the top-10.

exotic

Avoid: — An ICD code tagged Meta == "J" in ClaML, marking a rare/exotic code; removable via --exclude-exotic.

chapter

Avoid: — The ICD-10-GM chapter, stored as a zero-padded two-digit string ("01".."22") derived from the ClaML Roman-numeral chapter code. The --chapters filter matches against this value.

BillableRecall@10

Avoid: — The project's lead metric: the share of billable-code eval cases whose true code appears in the top-10 suggestions.