@inproceedings{igamberdiev-habernal-2022-privacy,
    title = "Privacy-Preserving Graph Convolutional Networks for Text Classification",
    author = "Igamberdiev, Timour  and
      Habernal, Ivan",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      B{\'e}chet, Fr{\'e}d{\'e}ric  and
      Blache, Philippe  and
      Choukri, Khalid  and
      Cieri, Christopher  and
      Declerck, Thierry  and
      Goggi, Sara  and
      Isahara, Hitoshi  and
      Maegaard, Bente  and
      Mariani, Joseph  and
      Mazo, H{\'e}l{\`e}ne  and
      Odijk, Jan  and
      Piperidis, Stelios",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference",
    month = jun,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Marseille, France",
    publisher = "European Language Resources Association",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/add-emnlp-2024-awards/2022.lrec-1.36/",
    pages = "338--350",
    abstract = "Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) are a powerful architecture for representation learning on documents that naturally occur as graphs, e.g., citation or social networks. However, sensitive personal information, such as documents with people`s profiles or relationships as edges, are prone to privacy leaks, as the trained model might reveal the original input. Although differential privacy (DP) offers a well-founded privacy-preserving framework, GCNs pose theoretical and practical challenges due to their training specifics. We address these challenges by adapting differentially-private gradient-based training to GCNs and conduct experiments using two optimizers on five NLP datasets in two languages. We propose a simple yet efficient method based on random graph splits that not only improves the baseline privacy bounds by a factor of 2.7 while retaining competitive F1 scores, but also provides strong privacy guarantees of epsilon = 1.0. We show that, under certain modeling choices, privacy-preserving GCNs perform up to 90{\%} of their non-private variants, while formally guaranteeing strong privacy measures."
}