Articles producció científica> Enginyeria Informàtica i Matemàtiques

Minimizing the disclosure risk of semantic correlations in document sanitization

  • Identification data

    Identifier: PC:400
    Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/PC400
    Authors:
    Sánchez, D.Batet, M.Viejo, A.
    Abstract:
    10.1016/j.ins.2013.06.042

  • Others:

    Author, as appears in the article.: Sánchez, D. Batet, M. Viejo, A.
    Department: Enginyeria Informàtica i Matemàtiques
    Abstract: Text sanitization is crucial to enable privacy-preserving declassification of confidential documents. Moreover, considering the advent of new information sharing technologies that enable the daily publication of thousands of textual documents, automatic and semi-automatic sanitization methods are needed. Even though several of these methods have been proposed, most of them detect and sanitize sensitive terms (e.g., people names, addresses, diseases, etc.) independently, neglecting the importance of semantic correlations. From the attacker’s perspective, semantic correlations can be exploited to disclose a sanitized term from the presence of one or several non-sanitized words. To tackle this problem, this paper presents a general-purpose method that, by taking the output of a standard sanitization mechanism, analyses, detects and proposes for sanitization those semantically correlated terms that represent a plausible disclosure risk for the already sanitized ones. Our method relies on an information-theoretic formulation of disclosure risk which is able to adapt its behavior to the criterion of the initial sanitizer. The evaluation, carried on over a collection of real documents, shows that semantic correlations represent a real privacy threat in prior sanitized documents, and that our method is able to detect them effectively. As a result, the disclosure risk of the sanitized output is significantly reduced with respect to standard sanitization mechanisms.
    licence for use: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/
    ISSN: 0020-0255
    Last page: 123
    Journal volume: 249
    Papper version: info:eu-repo/semantics/submittedVersion
    Link to the original source: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0020025513004799
    Licence document URL: https://repositori.urv.cat/ca/proteccio-de-dades/
    Article's DOI: 10.1016/j.ins.2013.06.042
    Entity: Universitat Rovira i Virgili.
    Journal publication year: 2013
    First page: 110