IncogniText: Privacy-enhancing Conditional Text Anonymization via LLM-based Private Attribute Randomization
Ahmed Frikha, Nassim Walha, Krishna Kanth Nakka, Ricardo Mendes, Xue Jiang, Xuebing Zhou
Abstract
In this work, we address the problem of text anonymization where the goal is to prevent adversaries from correctly inferring private attributes of the author, while keeping the text utility, i.e., meaning and semantics. We propose IncogniText, a technique that anonymizes the text to mislead a potential adversary into predicting a wrong private attribute value. Our empirical evaluation shows a reduction of private attribute leakage by more than across 8 different private attributes. Finally, we demonstrate the maturity of IncogniText for real-world applications by distilling its anonymization capability into a set of LoRA parameters associated with an on-device model. Our results show the possibility of reducing privacy leakage by more than half with limited impact on utility.- Anthology ID:
- 2025.ijcnlp-long.134
- 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
- Venues:
- IJCNLP | AACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2490–2501
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.134/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Ahmed Frikha, Nassim Walha, Krishna Kanth Nakka, Ricardo Mendes, Xue Jiang, and Xuebing Zhou. 2025. IncogniText: Privacy-enhancing Conditional Text Anonymization via LLM-based Private Attribute Randomization. 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 2490–2501, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- IncogniText: Privacy-enhancing Conditional Text Anonymization via LLM-based Private Attribute Randomization (Frikha et al., IJCNLP-AACL 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.134.pdf