TUNE: A Task For Turkish Machine Unlearning For Data Privacy

Doruk Benli, Ada Canoğlu, Nehir İlkim Gönençer, Dilara Keküllüoğlu


Abstract
Most large language models (LLMs) are trainedon massive datasets that include private infor-mation, which may be disclosed to third-partyusers in output generation. Developers put de-fences to prevent the generation of harmful andprivate information, but jailbreaking methodscan be used to bypass them. Machine unlearn-ing aims to remove information that may beprivate or harmful from the model’s genera-tion without retraining the model from scratch.While machine unlearning has gained somepopularity to counter the removal of privateinformation, especially in English, little to noattention has been given to Turkish unlearn-ing paradigms or existing benchmarks. In thisstudy, we introduce TUNE (Turkish Unlearn-ing Evaluation), the first benchmark datasetfor Turkish unlearning task for personal infor-mation. TUNE consists of 9842 input-targettext pairs about 50 fictitious personalities withtwo training task types: (1) Q A and (2) In-formation Request. We fine-tuned the mT5base model to evaluate various unlearning meth-ods, including our proposed approach. We findthat while current methods can help unlearnunwanted private information in Turkish, theyalso unlearn other information we want to re-tain in the model.
Anthology ID:
2026.sigturk-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop Natural Language Processing for Turkic Languages (SIGTURK 2026)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Kemal Oflazer, Abdullatif Köksal, Onur Varol
Venues:
SIGTURK | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
28–37
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigturk-1.3/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Doruk Benli, Ada Canoğlu, Nehir İlkim Gönençer, and Dilara Keküllüoğlu. 2026. TUNE: A Task For Turkish Machine Unlearning For Data Privacy. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop Natural Language Processing for Turkic Languages (SIGTURK 2026), pages 28–37, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TUNE: A Task For Turkish Machine Unlearning For Data Privacy (Benli et al., SIGTURK 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigturk-1.3.pdf