INCOGNITUS: A Toolbox for Automated Clinical Notes Anonymization

Bruno Ribeiro, Vitor Rolla, Ricardo Santos


Abstract
Automated text anonymization is a classical problem in Natural Language Processing (NLP). The topic has evolved immensely throughout the years, with the first list-search and rule-based solutions evolving to statistical modeling approaches and later to advanced systems that rely on powerful state-of-the-art language models. Even so, these solutions fail to be widely implemented in the most privacy-demanding areas of activity, such as healthcare; none of them is perfect, and most can not guarantee rigorous anonymization. This paper presents INCOGNITUS, a flexible platform for the automated anonymization of clinical notes that offers the possibility of applying different techniques. The available tools include an underexplored yet promising method that guarantees 100% recall by replacing each word with a semantically identical one. In addition, the presented framework incorporates a performance evaluation module to compute a novel metric for information loss assessment in real-time.
Anthology ID:
2023.eacl-demo.22
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Danilo Croce, Luca Soldaini
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
187–194
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-demo.22
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-demo.22
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bruno Ribeiro, Vitor Rolla, and Ricardo Santos. 2023. INCOGNITUS: A Toolbox for Automated Clinical Notes Anonymization. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, pages 187–194, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
INCOGNITUS: A Toolbox for Automated Clinical Notes Anonymization (Ribeiro et al., EACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-demo.22.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-demo.22.mp4