How do we measure privacy in text? A survey of text anonymization metrics

Yaxuan Ren, Krithika Ramesh, Yaxing Yao, Anjalie Field


Abstract
In this work, we aim to clarify and reconcile metrics for evaluating privacy protection in text through a systematic survey.Although text anonymization is essential for enabling NLP research and model development in domains with sensitive data, evaluating whether anonymization methods sufficiently protect privacy remains an open challenge. In manually reviewing 47 papers that report privacy metrics, we identify and compare six distinct privacy notions, and analyze how the associated metrics capture different aspects of privacy risk. We then assess how well these notions align with legal privacy standards (HIPAA and GDPR), as well as user-centered expectations grounded in HCI studies. Our analysis offers practical guidance on navigating the landscape of privacy evaluation approaches further and highlights gaps in current practices. Ultimately, we aim to facilitate more robust, comparable, and legally aware privacy evaluations in text anonymization.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-ijcnlp.94
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1532–1544
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.94/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yaxuan Ren, Krithika Ramesh, Yaxing Yao, and Anjalie Field. 2025. How do we measure privacy in text? A survey of text anonymization metrics. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1532–1544, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
How do we measure privacy in text? A survey of text anonymization metrics (Ren et al., Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.94.pdf