I Am No One: Style-Aware Paraphrasing for Text Anonymization

Abstract:Authorship attribution models can re-identify users from seemingly anonymized text by exploiting stable stylistic fingerprints, even after explicit identifiers are removed, posing a growing privacy risk for text publishing and analytics. This risk extends to speech-derived text such as ASR transcripts of meetings and call-center conversations, where stylometric leakage can persist even after acoustic anonymization. Differential privacy-based anonymization often severely degrades text quality and utility. We propose a style-aware, prompt-driven anonymization approach that uses pretrained large language models to construct compact stylistic profiles from minimal samples and rewrite text to suppress identifiable style markers while preserving meaning. Across blog and review datasets, our approach reduces authorship attribution F1 by 60-70% while maintaining content quality and readability, substantially outperforming DP-based and non-DP baselines.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)

arXiv:2609.12341 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.12341v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.12341 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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