@inproceedings{meisenbacher-matthes-2025-privacy,
    title = "With Privacy, Size Matters: On the Importance of Dataset Size in Differentially Private Text Rewriting",
    author = "Meisenbacher, Stephen  and
      Matthes, Florian",
    editor = "Inui, Kentaro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Wang, Haofen  and
      Wong, Derek F.  and
      Bhattacharyya, Pushpak  and
      Banerjee, Biplab  and
      Ekbal, Asif  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Singh, Dhirendra Pratap",
    booktitle = "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 = dec,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Mumbai, India",
    publisher = "The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.3/",
    pages = "37--47",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-298-5",
    abstract = "Recent work in Differential Privacy with Natural Language Processing (DP NLP) has proposed numerous promising techniques in the form of *text rewriting* mechanisms. In the evaluation of these mechanisms, an often-ignored aspect is that of *dataset size*, or rather, the effect of dataset size on a mechanism{'}s efficacy for utility and privacy preservation. In this work, we are the first to introduce this factor in the evaluation of DP text privatization, where we design utility and privacy tests on large-scale datasets with dynamic split sizes. We run these tests on datasets of varying size with up to one million texts, and we focus on quantifying the effect of increasing dataset size on the privacy-utility trade-off. Our findings reveal that dataset size plays an integral part in evaluating DP text rewriting mechanisms; additionally, these findings call for more rigorous evaluation procedures in DP NLP, as well as shed light on the future of DP NLP in practice and at scale."
}