Christine Hovhannisyan


2026

This work discusses sexual offending, specifically child sexual abuse material (CSAM), in the context of prevention. We introduce a domain-specific, span-level annotation scheme and guidelines to identify psychosocial risk and protective factors in therapist-led, anonymous chat interventions with voluntarily help-seeking individuals concerned about their pedophilic interests and the risk of CSAM use. The scheme is grounded in previous research and clinical experience, and intended for within-intervention guidance and longitudinal tracking, rather than actuarial risk scoring. Annotating a pilot subset (8 clients, 31 sessions), inter-annotator agreement was moderate but improved after calibration, which is consistent with the linguistic and clinical ambivalence present in the data. We track a session-wise Protective Ratio, i.e., the share of protective factors among all coded factors, and examine its behaviour over time during the intervention and around self-reported relapse within clients. In exploratory automation, LLM-based span extraction outperforms BERT baselines but overall performance remains limited by small data and mixed-evidence spans. While complete anonymisation of the corpus is in progress, we release the label scheme, guidelines, and non-sensitive artefacts of our analyses.
Accessing sensitive patient data for machine learning is challenging due to privacy concerns. Datasets with annotations of personally identifiable information are crucial for developing and testing anonymization systems, which would enable safe data sharing that complies with privacy regulations. Since accessing real patient data is a bottleneck, synthetic data offers an efficient solution for data scarcity, bypassing privacy regulations that apply to real data. Moreover, neural machine translation can help to create high-quality data for low-resource languages by translating validated real or synthetic data from a high-resource language. In this work, we create a multilingual anonymization benchmark in ten languages, using a machine translation methodology that preserves the original annotations and renders city and people names in a culturally and contextually appropriate form in each target language. Our evaluation study with medical professionals confirms the quality of the translations, both in general and with respect to the translation and adaptation of personal information. Our benchmark with over 2,500 annotations of personal information can be used in many applications, including training annotators, validating annotations across institutions without legal complications, and helping improve the performance of automatic personal information detection. We make our benchmark and annotation guidelines available for further research.