Privacy Guarantees for De-identifying Text Transformations

Machine Learning approaches to Natural Language Processing tasks benefit from a comprehensive collection of real-life user data. At the same time, there is a clear need for protecting the privacy of the users whose data is collected and processed. For text collections, such as, e.g., transcripts of voice interactions or patient records, replacing sensitive parts with benign alternatives can provide de-identification. However, how much privacy is actually guaranteed by such text transformations, and are the resulting texts still useful for machine learning? In this paper, we derive formal privacy guarantees for general text transformation-based de-identification methods on the basis of Differential Privacy. We also measure the effect that different ways of masking private information in dialog transcripts have on a subsequent machine learning task. To this end, we formulate different masking strategies and compare their privacy-utility trade-offs. In particular, we compare a simple redact approach with more sophisticated word-by-word replacement using deep learning models on multiple natural language understanding tasks like named entity recognition, intent detection, and dialog act classification. We find that only word-by-word replacement is robust against performance drops in various tasks.Comment: Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 202

Automatic detection of protected health information from clinic narratives

This paper presents a natural language processing (NLP) system that was designed to participate in the 2014 i2b2 de-identification challenge. The challenge task aims to identify and classify seven main Protected Health Information (PHI) categories and 25 associated sub categories. A hybrid model was proposed which combines machine learning techniques with keyword-based and rule based approaches to deal with the complexity inherent in PHI categories. Our proposed approaches exploit a rich set of linguistic features, both syntactic and word surface-oriented, which are further enriched by task specific features and regular expression template patterns to characterize the semantics of various PHI categories. Our system achieved promising accuracy on the challenge test data with an overall micro-averaged F measure of 93.6%, which was the winner of this de-identification challenge

Fine-Grained Analysis of Language Varieties and Demographics

[EN] The rise of social media empowers people to interact and communicate with anyone anywhere in the world. The possibility of being anonymous avoids censorship and enables freedom of expression. Nevertheless, this anonymity might lead to cybersecurity issues, such as opinion spam, sexual harassment, incitement to hatred or even terrorism propaganda. In such cases, there is a need to know more about the anonymous users and this could be useful in several domains beyond security and forensics such as marketing, for example. In this paper, we focus on a fine-grained analysis of language varieties while considering also the authors¿ demographics. We present a Low-Dimensionality Statistical Embedding method to represent text documents. We compared the performance of this method with the best performing teams in the Author Profiling task at PAN 2017. We obtained an average accuracy of 92.08% versus 91.84% for the best performing team at PAN 2017. We also analyse the relationship of the language variety identification with the authors¿ gender. Furthermore, we applied our proposed method to a more fine-grained annotated corpus of Arabic varieties covering 22 Arab countries and obtained an overall accuracy of 88.89%. We have also investigated the effect of the authors¿ age and gender on the identification of the different Arabic varieties, as well as the effect of the corpus size on the performance of our method.This publication was made possible by NPRP grant 9-175-1-033 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation). The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.Rangel, F.; Rosso, P.; Zaghouani, W.; Charfi, A. (2020). Fine-Grained Analysis of Language Varieties and Demographics. Natural Language Engineering. 26(6):641-661. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1351324920000108S641661266Kestemont, M. , Tschuggnall, M. , Stamatatos, E. , Daelemans, W. , Specht, G. , Stein, B. and Potthast, M. 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ViTs are Everywhere: A Comprehensive Study Showcasing Vision Transformers in Different Domain

Transformer design is the de facto standard for natural language processing tasks. The success of the transformer design in natural language processing has lately piqued the interest of researchers in the domain of computer vision. When compared to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Vision Transformers (ViTs) are becoming more popular and dominant solutions for many vision problems. Transformer-based models outperform other types of networks, such as convolutional and recurrent neural networks, in a range of visual benchmarks. We evaluate various vision transformer models in this work by dividing them into distinct jobs and examining their benefits and drawbacks. ViTs can overcome several possible difficulties with convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The goal of this survey is to show the first use of ViTs in CV. In the first phase, we categorize various CV applications where ViTs are appropriate. Image classification, object identification, image segmentation, video transformer, image denoising, and NAS are all CV applications. Our next step will be to analyze the state-of-the-art in each area and identify the models that are currently available. In addition, we outline numerous open research difficulties as well as prospective research possibilities.Comment: ICCD-2023. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2208.04309 by other author

Social Media Operationalized for GIS: The Prequel

With social media a de facto global communication channel used to disseminate news, entertainment, and one’s self-revelations, the latter contains double-talk, peculiar insight, and contextual observation about real-world events. The primary objective is to propose a novel pipeline to classify a tweet as either “useful” or “not useful” by using widely-accepted Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, and measure the effect of such method based on the change in performance of a Geographical Information System (GIS) artifact. A 1,000 tweet sample is manually tagged and compared to an innovative social media grammar applied by a rule-based social media NLP pipeline. Evaluation underpins answering, prior to content analysis of a tweet, does a method exist to support identifying a tweet as “useful” for subsequent processing? Indeed, “useful” tweet identification via NLP returned precision of 0.9256, recall of 0.6590, and F-measure of 0.7699; consequently GIS social media processing increased 0.2194 over baseline