K-anonymity guarantee in text anonymization using word embeddings

Abstract

Systems and methods for k-anonymizing a corpus of documents using linguistic similarities and embeddings distances between words. For instance, a word pair is selected based on linguistic similarity (e.g., belonging to the same part of speech) and small embeddings distance. For the selected word pair, a plurality of words is retrieved, also based on linguistic similarity to, and embeddings distances from, the selected word pair. Out of the plurality of words, a third word is identified that has a closer linguistic similarity to the word pair and also has smaller embeddings distances from the word pair. Each word in the word pair is then replaced by the third word. The process is repeated until k-anonymity is achieved.