English

Sentence-level Privacy for Document Embeddings

Machine Learning 2022-05-11 v1 Computation and Language

Abstract

User language data can contain highly sensitive personal content. As such, it is imperative to offer users a strong and interpretable privacy guarantee when learning from their data. In this work, we propose SentDP: pure local differential privacy at the sentence level for a single user document. We propose a novel technique, DeepCandidate, that combines concepts from robust statistics and language modeling to produce high-dimensional, general-purpose ϵ\epsilon-SentDP document embeddings. This guarantees that any single sentence in a document can be substituted with any other sentence while keeping the embedding ϵ\epsilon-indistinguishable. Our experiments indicate that these private document embeddings are useful for downstream tasks like sentiment analysis and topic classification and even outperform baseline methods with weaker guarantees like word-level Metric DP.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2205.04605,
  title  = {Sentence-level Privacy for Document Embeddings},
  author = {Casey Meehan and Khalil Mrini and Kamalika Chaudhuri},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.04605},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

Presented at ACL 2022 main conference

R2 v1 2026-06-24T11:12:17.608Z