Anonymization Through Substitution: Words vs Sentences

Abstract

Anonymization of clinical text is crucial to allow the sharing and disclosure of health records while safeguarding patient privacy. However, automated anonymization processes are still highly limited in healthcare practice, as these systems cannot assure the anonymization of all private information. This paper explores the application of a novel technique that guarantees the removal of all sensitive information through the usage of text embeddings obtained from a de-identified dataset, replacing every word or sentence of a clinical note. We analyze the performance of different embedding techniques and models by evaluating them using recently proposed evaluation metrics. The results demonstrate that sentence replacement is better at keeping relevant medical information untouched, while the word replacement strategy performs better in terms of anonymization sensitivity. (c) 2024 Association for Computational Linguistics.