Towards Privacy by Design in Learner Corpora Research: A Case of On-the-fly Pseudonymization of Swedish Learner Essays

Elena Volodina, Yousuf Ali Mohammed, Sandra Derbring, Arild Matsson, Beata Megyesi


Abstract
This article reports on an ongoing project aiming at automatization of pseudonymization of learner essays. The process includes three steps: identification of personal information in an unstructured text, labeling for a category, and pseudonymization. We experiment with rule-based methods for detection of 15 categories out of the suggested 19 (Megyesi et al., 2018) that we deem important and/or doable with automatic approaches. For the detection and labeling steps,we use resources covering personal names, geographic names, company and university names and others. For the pseudonymization step, we replace the item using another item of the same type from the above-mentioned resources. Evaluation of the detection and labeling steps are made on a set of manually anonymized essays. The results are promising and show that 89% of the personal information can be successfully identified in learner data, and annotated correctly with an inter-annotator agreement of 86% measured as Fleiss kappa and Krippendorff’s alpha.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.32
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
357–369
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.32
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.32
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Elena Volodina, Yousuf Ali Mohammed, Sandra Derbring, Arild Matsson, and Beata Megyesi. 2020. Towards Privacy by Design in Learner Corpora Research: A Case of On-the-fly Pseudonymization of Swedish Learner Essays. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 357–369, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Privacy by Design in Learner Corpora Research: A Case of On-the-fly Pseudonymization of Swedish Learner Essays (Volodina et al., COLING 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.32.pdf