Rahat Masood
Author directory2026
GuardianAgent: Policy-Conditioned Risk-Adaptive Anonymization with Verified Adversarial Escalation
Ruiyi Yang | Gayathri Lihinikaduarachchi | Rahat Masood | Flora D. Salim | Salil S. Kanhere
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Ruiyi Yang | Gayathri Lihinikaduarachchi | Rahat Masood | Flora D. Salim | Salil S. Kanhere
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Privacy protection for live web traffic requires more than detecting private spans. Agent-based privacy protection systems must determine whether an outgoing action complies with the destination site’s privacy policy, then apply only the level of rewriting or sanitisation justified by the residual disclosure risk. We present **GuardianAgent**, a policy-conditioned anonymization framework that couples structured risk assessment with verified adaptive rewriting. GuardianAgent computes risk through **AMRSF** (*Adaptive Multi-factor Risk Scoring Formula*), an explicit controller that combines policy-violation likelihood with data sensitivity, recipient transmission, purpose legitimacy, contextual basis, and policy transparency, rather than relying on an LLM to assign risk directly. This risk score determines both the allow/transform/deny decision and the initial anonymization level. For efficiency, GuardianAgent uses an evidential fast path for low-uncertainty policy matches and invokes an LLM slow path only for uncertain cases. For rewriting, it applies a **five-level hierarchy** driven by a **verified adversarial guesser**: guesses trigger escalation only when supported by the original text, preventing hallucinated attacker confidence from causing unnecessary over-anonymization. Experiments across three benchmarks spanning legal text (*TAB*), Reddit posts (*SynthPAI*), and multi-format synthetic PII records (*PII-Masking-300k*) show that GuardianAgent achieves the strongest privacy–utility trade-off among published baselines and is the only method to reach ≥ 0.90 privacy in all three domains, remaining robust under a backbone switch. Action-context stress tests further show that the same outgoing text receives different decisions and anonymization strengths under different recipients, purposes, action bases, and policy-transparency conditions.
2024
Comparison of Multilingual and Bilingual Models for Satirical News Detection of Arabic and English
Omar W. Abdalla | Aditya Joshi | Rahat Masood | Salil S. Kanhere
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association
Omar W. Abdalla | Aditya Joshi | Rahat Masood | Salil S. Kanhere
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association
Satirical news is real news combined with a humorous comment or exaggerated content, and it often mimics the format and style of real news. However, satirical news is often misunderstood as misinformation, especially by individuals from different cultural and social backgrounds. This research addresses the challenge of distinguishing satire from truthful news by leveraging multilingual satire detection methods in English and Arabic. We explore both zero-shot and chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting using two language models, Jais-chat(13B) and LLaMA-2-chat(7B). Our results show that CoT prompting offers a significant advantage for the Jais-chat model over the LLaMA-2-chat model. Specifically, Jais-chat achieved the best performance, with an F1-score of 80% in English when using CoT prompting. These results high- light the importance of structured reasoning in CoT, which enhances contextual understanding and is vital for complex tasks like satire detection.