Processing text for privacy: an information flow perspective

Natasha Fernandes, Mark Dras, Annabelle McIver*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference proceeding contributionpeer-review

7 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The problem of text document obfuscation is to provide an automated mechanism which is able to make accessible the content of a text document without revealing the identity of its writer. This is more challenging than it seems, because an adversary equipped with powerful machine learning mechanisms is able to identify authorship (with good accuracy) where, for example, the name of the author has been redacted. Current obfuscation methods are ad hoc and have been shown to provide weak protection against such adversaries. Differential privacy, which is able to provide strong guarantees of privacy in some domains, has been thought not to be applicable to text processing. In this paper we will review obfuscation as a quantitative information flow problem and explain how generalised differential privacy can be applied to this problem to provide strong anonymisation guarantees in a standard model for text processing.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFormal Methods
Subtitle of host publication22nd International Symposium, FM 2018, Held as Part of the Federated Logic Conference, FloC 2018, Proceedings
EditorsKlaus Havelund, Jan Peleska, Bill Roscoe, Erik de Vink
Place of PublicationCham
PublisherSpringer, Springer Nature
Pages3-21
Number of pages19
ISBN (Electronic)9783319955827
ISBN (Print)9783319955810
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2018
Event22nd International Symposium on Formal Methods, FM 2018 Held as Part of the Federated Logic Conference, FloC 2018 - Oxford, United Kingdom
Duration: 15 Jul 201817 Jul 2018

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume10951 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference22nd International Symposium on Formal Methods, FM 2018 Held as Part of the Federated Logic Conference, FloC 2018
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityOxford
Period15/07/1817/07/18

Keywords

  • Author anonymity
  • Author obfuscation
  • Information flow
  • Privacy
  • Probabilistic semantics
  • Refinement
  • Text processing

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