Sensitive Data Detection and Classification in Spanish Clinical Text: Experiments with BERT

Aitor García Pablos, Naiara Perez, Montse Cuadros


Abstract
Massive digital data processing provides a wide range of opportunities and benefits, but at the cost of endangering personal data privacy. Anonymisation consists in removing or replacing sensitive information from data, enabling its exploitation for different purposes while preserving the privacy of individuals. Over the years, a lot of automatic anonymisation systems have been proposed; however, depending on the type of data, the target language or the availability of training documents, the task remains challenging still. The emergence of novel deep-learning models during the last two years has brought large improvements to the state of the art in the field of Natural Language Processing. These advancements have been most noticeably led by BERT, a model proposed by Google in 2018, and the shared language models pre-trained on millions of documents. In this paper, we use a BERT-based sequence labelling model to conduct a series of anonymisation experiments on several clinical datasets in Spanish. We also compare BERT with other algorithms. The experiments show that a simple BERT-based model with general-domain pre-training obtains highly competitive results without any domain specific feature engineering.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.552
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
4486–4494
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.552
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aitor García Pablos, Naiara Perez, and Montse Cuadros. 2020. Sensitive Data Detection and Classification in Spanish Clinical Text: Experiments with BERT. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 4486–4494, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Sensitive Data Detection and Classification in Spanish Clinical Text: Experiments with BERT (García Pablos et al., LREC 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.552.pdf