Semantic search log k-anonymization with generalized k-cores of query concept graph

Abstract

Search log k-anonymization is based on the elimination of infrequent queries under exact (or nearly exact) matching conditions, which usually results in a big data loss and impaired utility. We present a more flexible, semantic approach to k-anonymity that consists of three steps: query concept mining, automatic query expansion, and affinity assessment of expanded queries. Based on the observation that many infrequent queries can be seen as refinements of a more general frequent query, we first model query concepts as probabilistically weighted n-grams and extract them from the search log data. Then, after expanding the original log queries with their weighted concepts, we find all the k-affine expanded queries under a given affinity threshold Θ, modeled as a generalized k-core of the graph of Θ-affine queries. Experimenting with the AOL data set, we show that this approach achieves levels of privacy comparable to those of plain k-anonymity while at the same time reducing the data losses to a great extent. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.