Anonymization Through Substitution: Words vs Sentences

Vasco Alves, Vitor Rolla, João Alveira, David Pissarra, Duarte Pereira, Isabel Curioso, André Carreiro, Henrique Lopes Cardoso


Abstract
Anonymization of clinical text is crucial to allow the sharing and disclosure of health records while safeguarding patient privacy. However, automated anonymization processes are still highly limited in healthcare practice, as these systems cannot assure the anonymization of all private information. This paper explores the application of a novel technique that guarantees the removal of all sensitive information through the usage of text embeddings obtained from a de-identified dataset, replacing every word or sentence of a clinical note. We analyze the performance of different embedding techniques and models by evaluating them using recently proposed evaluation metrics. The results demonstrate that sentence replacement is better at keeping relevant medical information untouched, while the word replacement strategy performs better in terms of anonymization sensitivity.
Anthology ID:
2024.privatenlp-1.9
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Privacy in Natural Language Processing
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Ivan Habernal, Sepideh Ghanavati, Abhilasha Ravichander, Vijayanta Jain, Patricia Thaine, Timour Igamberdiev, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Oluwaseyi Feyisetan
Venues:
PrivateNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
85–90
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.privatenlp-1.9
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vasco Alves, Vitor Rolla, João Alveira, David Pissarra, Duarte Pereira, Isabel Curioso, André Carreiro, and Henrique Lopes Cardoso. 2024. Anonymization Through Substitution: Words vs Sentences. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Privacy in Natural Language Processing, pages 85–90, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Anonymization Through Substitution: Words vs Sentences (Alves et al., PrivateNLP-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.privatenlp-1.9.pdf