A Multifaceted Framework to Evaluate Evasion, Content Preservation, and Misattribution in Authorship Obfuscation Techniques

Malik Altakrori, Thomas Scialom, Benjamin C. M. Fung, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung


Abstract
Authorship obfuscation techniques have commonly been evaluated based on their ability to hide the author’s identity (evasion) while preserving the content of the original text. However, to avoid overstating the systems’ effectiveness, evasion detection must be evaluated using competitive identification techniques in settings that mimic real-life scenarios, and the outcomes of the content-preservation evaluation have to be interpretable by potential users of these obfuscation tools. Motivated by recent work on cross-topic authorship identification and content preservation in summarization, we re-evaluate different authorship obfuscation techniques on detection evasion and content preservation. Furthermore, we propose a new information-theoretic measure to characterize the misattribution harm that can be caused by detection evasion. Our results reveal key weaknesses in state-of-the-art obfuscation techniques and a surprisingly competitive effectiveness from a back-translation baseline in all evaluation aspects.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.153
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2391–2406
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.153
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.153
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Malik Altakrori, Thomas Scialom, Benjamin C. M. Fung, and Jackie Chi Kit Cheung. 2022. A Multifaceted Framework to Evaluate Evasion, Content Preservation, and Misattribution in Authorship Obfuscation Techniques. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2391–2406, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Multifaceted Framework to Evaluate Evasion, Content Preservation, and Misattribution in Authorship Obfuscation Techniques (Altakrori et al., EMNLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.153.pdf