Skip to main content

Towards Quantifying the Privacy of Redacted Text

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Advances in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13981))

Included in the following conference series:

  • 1492 Accesses

Abstract

In this paper we propose use of a k-anonymity-like approach for evaluating the privacy of redacted text. Given a piece of redacted text we use a state of the art transformer-based deep learning network to reconstruct the original text. This generates multiple full texts that are consistent with the redacted text, i.e. which are grammatical, have the same non-redacted words etc., and represents each of these using an embedding vector that captures sentence similarity. In this way we can estimate the number, diversity and quality of full text consistent with the redacted text and so evaluate privacy.

D. Leith—This work was supported by Science Foundation Ireland grant 16/IA/4610.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 99.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Adelani, D.I., Davody, A., Kleinbauer, T., Klakow, D.: Privacy guarantees for de-identifying text transformations. arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.03101 (2020)

  2. Bosch, N., Crues, R., Shaik, N., Paquette, L.: “hello,[redacted]”: Protecting student privacy in analyses of online discussion forums. Grantee Submission (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Greene, D., Cunningham, P.: Practical solutions to the problem of diagonal dominance in kernel document clustering. In: Proceedings of 23rd International Conference on Machine learning (ICML 2006), pp. 377–384. ACM Press (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Hucka, M.: Nostril: A nonsense string evaluator written in python. J. Open Source Softw. 3(25), 596 (2018). https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00596

  5. Jing, L.P., Huang, H.K., Shi, H.B.: Improved feature selection approach TFIDF in text mining. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics, vol. 2, pp. 944–946 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICMLC.2002.1174522

  6. Lewis, M., et al.: Bart: denoising sequence-to-sequence pre-training for natural language generation, translation, and comprehension. arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.13461 (2019)

  7. Maas, A.L., Daly, R.E., Pham, P.T., Huang, D., Ng, A.Y., Potts, C.: Learning word vectors for sentiment analysis. In: Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pp. 142–150. Association for Computational Linguistics, Portland, Oregon, USA, June 2011. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P11-1015

  8. McAuley, J.J., Leskovec, J.: From amateurs to connoisseurs: modeling the evolution of user expertise through online reviews. In: Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web, pp. 897–908 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Samarati, P., Sweeney, L.: Protecting privacy when disclosing information: k-anonymity and its enforcement through generalization and suppression (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Wen, Z., Lu, X.H., Reddy, S.: MeDAL: medical abbreviation disambiguation dataset for natural language understanding pretraining. In: Proceedings of the 3rd Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop. Association for Computational Linguistics (2020). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.clinicalnlp-1.15

  11. Zhang, X., Zhao, J.J., LeCun, Y.: Character-level convolutional networks for text classification. CoRR abs/1509.01626 (2015). arxiv.org:1509.01626

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Douglas Leith .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Gusain, V., Leith, D. (2023). Towards Quantifying the Privacy of Redacted Text. In: Kamps, J., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13981. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28238-6_32

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28238-6_32

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-28237-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-28238-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics