Thailand

This position paper investigates the problem of automated text anonymisation, which is a prerequisite for secure sharing of documents containing sensitive information about individuals.
We summarise the key concepts behind text anonymisation and provide a review of current approaches. Anonymisation methods have so far been developed in two fields with little mutual interaction, namely natural language processing and privacy-preserving data publishing. Based on a case study, we outline the benefits and limitations of these approaches and discuss a number of open challenges, such as (1) how to account for multiple types of semantic inferences, (2) how to strike a balance between disclosure risk and data utility and (3) how to evaluate the quality of the resulting anonymisation. We lay out a case for moving beyond sequence labelling models and incorporate explicit measures of disclosure risk into the text anonymisation process.

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

Anonymisation Models for Text Data: State of the art, Challenges and Future Directions

privacy-preserving nlp

sequence labelling

data privacy

text anonymisation

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

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The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

technical paper

Privacy plays a crucial role in preserving democratic ideals and personal autonomy. The dominant legal approach to privacy in many jurisdictions is the “Notice and Choice” paradigm, where privacy policies are the primary instrument used to convey information to users. However, privacy policies are long and complex documents that are difficult for users to read and comprehend. We discuss how language technologies can play an important role in addressing this information gap, reporting on initial progress towards helping three specific categories of stakeholders take advantage of digital privacy policies: consumers, enterprises, and regulators. Our goal is to provide a roadmap for the development and use of language technologies to empower users to reclaim control over their privacy, limit privacy harms, and rally research efforts from the community towards addressing an issue with large social impact. We highlight many remaining opportunities to develop language technologies that are more precise or nuanced in the way in which they use the text of privacy policies.

Breaking Down Walls of Text: How Can NLP Benefit Consumer Privacy?

Open pit mines left many regions worldwide inhospitable or uninhabitable. Many sites are left behind in a hazardous or contaminated state, show remnants of waste, or have other restrictions imposed upon them, e.g., for the protection of human or nature. Such information has to be permanently managed in order to reuse those areas in the future. In this work we present and evaluate an automated workflow for supporting the post-mining management of former lignite open pit mines in the eastern part of Germany, where prior to any planned land reuse, aforementioned information has to be acquired to ensure the safety and validity of such an endeavor. Usually, this information is found in expert reports, either in the form of paper documents, or in the best case as digitized unstructured text---all of them in German language. However, due to the size and complexity of these documents, any inquiry is tedious and time-consuming, thereby slowing down or even obstructing the reuse of related areas. Since no training data is available, we employ active learning in order to perform multi-label sentence classification for two categories of restrictions and seven categories of topics. The final system integrates optical character recognition (OCR), active-learning-based text classification, and geographic information system visualization in order to effectively extract, query, and visualize this information for any area of interest. Active learning and text classification results are twofold: Whereas the restriction categories were reasonably accurate (>0.85 F1), the seven topic-oriented categories seemed to be complex even for human annotators and achieved mediocre evaluation scores (<0.70 F1).

Supporting Land Reuse of Former Open Pit Mining Sites using Text Classification and Active Learning

Questions of fairness, robustness, and transparency are paramount to address before deploying NLP systems. Central to these concerns is the question of reliability: Can NLP systems reliably treat different demographics fairly and function correctly in diverse and noisy environments? To address this, we argue for the need for reliability testing and contextualize it among existing work on improving accountability. We show how adversarial attacks can be reframed for this goal, via a framework for developing reliability tests. We argue that reliability testing --- with an emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration --- will enable rigorous and targeted testing, and aid in the enactment and enforcement of industry standards.

Reliability Testing for Natural Language Processing Systems

Mental health conditions remain underdiagnosed even in countries with common access to advanced medical care. The ability to accurately and efficiently predict mood from easily collectible data has several important implications for the early detection, intervention, and treatment of mental health disorders. One promising data source to help monitor human behavior is daily smartphone usage. However, care must be taken to summarize behaviors without identifying the user through personal (e.g., personally identifiable information) or protected (e.g., race, gender) attributes. In this paper, we study behavioral markers of daily mood using a recent dataset of mobile behaviors from adolescent populations at high risk of suicidal behaviors. Using computational models, we find that language and multimodal representations of mobile typed text (spanning typed characters, words, keystroke timings, and app usage) are predictive of daily mood. However, we find that models trained to predict mood often also capture private user identities in their intermediate representations. To tackle this problem, we evaluate approaches that obfuscate user identity while remaining predictive. By combining multimodal representations with privacy-preserving learning, we are able to push forward the performance-privacy frontier.

Learning Language and Multimodal Privacy-Preserving Markers of Mood from Mobile Data

Humans have been shown to give contrastive explanations, which explain why an observed event happened rather than some other counterfactual event (the contrast case). Despite the influential role that contrastivity plays in how humans explain, this property is largely missing from current methods for explaining NLP models. We present Minimal Contrastive Editing (MiCE), a method for producing contrastive explanations of model predictions in the form of edits to inputs that change model outputs to the contrast case. Our experiments across three tasks---binary sentiment classification, topic classification, and multiple-choice question answering---show that MiCE is able to produce edits that are not only contrastive, but also minimal and fluent, consistent with human contrastive edits. We demonstrate how MiCE edits can be used for two use cases in NLP system development---debugging incorrect model outputs and uncovering dataset artifacts---and thereby illustrate that producing contrastive explanations is a promising research direction for model interpretability.

Explaining NLP Models via Minimal Contrastive Editing (MiCE)

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 mechanisms still provide low utility, as cursed by the high-dimensional text representation. The companion issue of utilizing sanitized texts for downstream analytics is also under-explored. This paper takes a direct approach to text sanitization. Our insight is to consider both sensitivity and similarity via our new local DP notion. The sanitized texts also contribute to our sanitization-aware pretraining and fine-tuning, enabling privacy-preserving natural language processing
over the BERT language model with promising utility. Surprisingly, the high utility does not boost up the success rate of inference attacks.

Differential Privacy for Text Analytics via Natural Text Sanitization

Recent neural dialogue models have achieved high performance in response ranking and evaluation in open-domain settings. Response ranking and evaluation tasks are formulated as context-response binary classification tasks and models generally learn to make predictions based on context-response content similarity. However, over-reliance on content similarity makes the models less sensitive to the presence of inconsistencies, incorrect time expressions and other factors important for response appropriateness and coherence. We propose approaches for automatically creating adversarial negative training data to help ranking and evaluation models learn features beyond content similarity. We propose mask-and-fill and keyword-guided approaches that generate negative examples for training more robust dialogue systems. These are adversarial responses that have high content similarity with the contexts but are either incoherent, inappropriate or not fluent. Our approaches are fully data-driven and can be easily incorporated with existing models and datasets. Experiments on classification, ranking and evaluation tasks across multiple datasets demonstrate that our approaches outperform strong baselines in providing informative negative examples for training dialogue systems.

Synthesizing Adversarial Negative Responses for Robust Response Ranking and Evaluation

We propose a structured extension to bidirectional-context conditional language generation, or "infilling," inspired by Frame Semantic theory (Fillmore, 1976). Guidance is provided through two approaches: (1) model fine-tuning, conditioning directly on observed symbolic frames, and (2) a novel extension to disjunctive lexically constrained decoding that leverages frame semantic lexical units. Automatic and human evaluations confirm that frame-guided generation allows for explicit manipulation of intended infill semantics, with minimal loss in distinguishability from human-generated text. Our methods flexibly apply to a variety of use scenarios, and we provide a codebase and interactive demo.

InFillmore: Frame-Guided Language Generation with Bidirectional Context

Semantic parsers map natural language utterances to meaning representations. The lack of a single standard for meaning representations led to the creation of a plethora of semantic parsing datasets. To unify different datasets and train a single model for them, we investigate the use of Multi-Task Learning (MTL) architectures. We experiment with five datasets (Geoquery, NLMaps, TOP, Overnight, AMR).
We find that an MTL architecture that shares the entire network across datasets yields competitive or better parsing accuracies than the single-task baselines, while reducing the total number of parameters by 68%. We further provide evidence that MTL has also better compositional generalization than single-task models. We also present a comparison of task sampling methods and propose a competitive alternative to widespread proportional sampling strategies.

One Semantic Parser to Parse Them All: Sequence to Sequence Multi-Task Learning on Semantic Parsing Datasets

Multilingual semantic parsing is a cost-effective method that allows a single model to understand different languages. However, researchers face a great imbalance of availability of training data, with English being resource rich, and other languages having much less data. To tackle the data limitation problem, we propose using machine translation to bootstrap multilingual training data from the more abundant English data. To compensate for the data quality of machine translated training data, we utilize transfer learning from pretrained multilingual encoders to further improve the model. To evaluate our multilingual models on human-written sentences as opposed to machine translated ones, we introduce a new multilingual semantic parsing dataset in English, Italian and Japanese based on the Facebook Task Oriented Parsing (TOP) dataset. We show that joint multilingual training with pretrained encoders substantially outperforms our baselines on the TOP dataset and outperforms the state-of-the-art model on the public NLMaps dataset. We also establish a new baseline for zero-shot learning on the TOP dataset. We find that a semantic parser trained only on English data achieves a zero-shot performance of 44.9% exact-match accuracy on Italian sentences.

Anonymisation Models for Text Data: State of the art, Challenges and Future Directions

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Breaking Down Walls of Text: How Can NLP Benefit Consumer Privacy?

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Breaking Down Walls of Text: How Can NLP Benefit Consumer Privacy?

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