Deep reinforcement learning-based text anonymization against private-attribute inference

Abstract

User-generated textual data is rich in content and has been used in many user behavioral modeling tasks. However, it could also leak user private-attribute information that they may not want to disclose such as age and location. User's privacy concerns mandate data publishers to protect privacy. One effective way is to anonymize the textual data. In this paper, we study the problem of textual data anonymization and propose a novel Reinforcement Learning-based Text Anonymizor, RLTA, which addresses the problem of private-attribute leakage while preserving the utility of textual data. Our approach first extracts a latent representation of the original text w.r.t. a given task, then leverages deep reinforcement learning to automatically learn an optimal strategy for manipulating text representations w.r.t. the received privacy and utility feedback. Experiments show the effectiveness of this approach in terms of preserving both privacy and utility.