Robust Multi-bit Natural Language Watermarking through Invariant Features

KiYoon Yoo, Wonhyuk Ahn, Jiho Jang, Nojun Kwak


Abstract
Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of valuable original natural language contents found in subscription-based media outlets, web novel platforms, and outputs of large language models. However, these contents are susceptible to illegal piracy and potential misuse without proper security measures. This calls for a secure watermarking system to guarantee copyright protection through leakage tracing or ownership identification. To effectively combat piracy and protect copyrights, a multi-bit watermarking framework should be able to embed adequate bits of information and extract the watermarks in a robust manner despite possible corruption. In this work, we explore ways to advance both payload and robustness by following a well-known proposition from image watermarking and identify features in natural language that are invariant to minor corruption. Through a systematic analysis of the possible sources of errors, we further propose a corruption-resistant infill model. Our full method improves upon the previous work on robustness by +16.8% point on average on four datasets, three corruption types, and two corruption ratios
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.117
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2092–2115
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.117
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.117
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
KiYoon Yoo, Wonhyuk Ahn, Jiho Jang, and Nojun Kwak. 2023. Robust Multi-bit Natural Language Watermarking through Invariant Features. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2092–2115, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Robust Multi-bit Natural Language Watermarking through Invariant Features (Yoo et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.117.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.117.mp4