Related papers: Textwash -- automated open-source text anonymisati…
Anonymizing text that contains sensitive information is crucial for a wide range of applications. Existing techniques face the emerging challenges of the re-identification ability of large language models (LLMs), which have shown advanced…
In today's digital world, casual user-generated content often contains subtle cues that may inadvertently expose sensitive personal attributes. Such risks underscore the growing importance of effective text anonymization to safeguard…
Open science is a fundamental pillar to promote scientific progress and collaboration, based on the principles of open data, open source and open access. However, the requirements for publishing and sharing open data are in many cases…
Anonymization plays a key role in protecting sensible information of individuals in real world datasets. Self-driving cars for example need high resolution facial features to track people and their viewing direction to predict future…
Texts convey sophisticated knowledge. However, texts also convey sensitive information. Despite the success of general-purpose language models and domain-specific mechanisms with differential privacy (DP), existing text sanitization…
Recent research advances achieve human-level accuracy for de-identifying free-text clinical notes on research datasets, but gaps remain in reproducing this in large real-world settings. This paper summarizes lessons learned from building a…
Clinical free-text data offers immense potential to improve population health research such as richer phenotyping, symptom tracking, and contextual understanding of patient care. However, these data present significant privacy risks due to…
We propose a novel method to bootstrap text anonymization models based on distant supervision. Instead of requiring manually labeled training data, the approach relies on a knowledge graph expressing the background information assumed to be…
Over the recent years, the availability of datasets containing personal, but anonymized information has been continuously increasing. Extensive research has revealed that such datasets are vulnerable to privacy breaches: being able to…
Operators of online social networks are increasingly sharing potentially sensitive information about users and their relationships with advertisers, application developers, and data-mining researchers. Privacy is typically protected by…
We show that while anonymization effectively obscures firm identity, it significantly reduces the power of textual understanding, thereby diminishing models' ability to extract meaningful economic signals from financial texts. This…
Anonymizing sensitive information in user text is essential for privacy, yet existing methods often apply uniform treatment across attributes, which can conflict with communicative intent and obscure necessary information. This is…
Machine Learning approaches to Natural Language Processing tasks benefit from a comprehensive collection of real-life user data. At the same time, there is a clear need for protecting the privacy of the users whose data is collected and…
Unstructured text from legal, medical, and administrative sources offers a rich but underutilized resource for research in public health and the social sciences. However, large-scale analysis is hampered by two key challenges: the presence…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated advanced capabilities in both text generation and comprehension, and their application to data archives might facilitate the privatization of sensitive information about the data subjects. In…
An unsolved challenge in distributed or federated learning is to effectively mitigate privacy risks without slowing down training or reducing accuracy. In this paper, we propose TextHide aiming at addressing this challenge for natural…
Recent advances in text mining and natural language processing technology have enabled researchers to detect an authors identity or demographic characteristics, such as age and gender, in several text genres by automatically analysing the…
Authorship obfuscation techniques hold the promise of helping people protect their privacy in online communications by automatically rewriting text to hide the identity of the original author. However, obfuscation has been evaluated in…
We explore the feasibility of automatically finding accounts that publish sensitive content on Twitter. One natural approach to this problem is to first create a list of sensitive keywords, and then identify Twitter accounts that use these…
Metadata are associated to most of the information we produce in our daily interactions and communication in the digital world. Yet, surprisingly, metadata are often still catergorized as non-sensitive. Indeed, in the past, researchers and…