DP-IPI: A Hybrid Differential Privacy Text Rewriting Mechanism for Indirect Personal Identifiers in Clinical Texts

Abstract:Despite the strengths of modern anonymization and de-identification techniques, the risk of re-identification remains significant due to the indirect identifiers remaining in texts. To address this problem, recent works have applied text rewriting under Differential Privacy (DP) to prevent data linkage by perturbing texts via noise addition. Such methods privatize all tokens in a text indiscriminately, diminishing text quality and usability in critical domains such as in clinical settings. Focusing on indirect personal identifiers (IPIs), we introduce a utility-preserving DP text rewriting method that only privatizes spans containing IPIs. We show that our method effectively reduces re-identification risks in clinical texts while being producing more coherent and usable output texts, leading to higher privacy-utility trade-offs. In this, we demonstrate the effectiveness of hybrid text privatization, which leverages the promise of DP in an efficient, usable manner.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2609.29684 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.29684v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.29684 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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