Unsupervised Text Deidentification

John Morris, Justin Chiu, Ramin Zabih, Alexander Rush


Abstract
Deidentification seeks to anonymize textual data prior to distribution. Automatic deidentification primarily uses supervised named entity recognition from human-labeled data points. We propose an unsupervised deidentification method that masks words that leak personally-identifying information. The approach utilizes a specially trained reidentification model to identify individuals from redacted personal documents. Motivated by K-anonymity based privacy, we generate redactions that ensure a minimum reidentification rank for the correct profile of the document. To evaluate this approach, we consider the task of deidentifying Wikipedia Biographies, and evaluate using an adversarial reidentification metric. Compared to a set of unsupervised baselines, our approach deidentifies documents more completely while removing fewer words. Qualitatively, we see that the approach eliminates many identifying aspects that would fall outside of the common named entity based approach.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-emnlp.352
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4777–4788
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.352
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-emnlp.352
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
John Morris, Justin Chiu, Ramin Zabih, and Alexander Rush. 2022. Unsupervised Text Deidentification. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 4777–4788, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Unsupervised Text Deidentification (Morris et al., Findings 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.352.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.352.mp4