Christoph Otto


2026

Accessing sensitive patient data for machine learning is challenging due to privacy concerns. Datasets with annotations of personally identifiable information are crucial for developing and testing anonymization systems, which would enable safe data sharing that complies with privacy regulations. Since accessing real patient data is a bottleneck, synthetic data offers an efficient solution for data scarcity, bypassing privacy regulations that apply to real data. Moreover, neural machine translation can help to create high-quality data for low-resource languages by translating validated real or synthetic data from a high-resource language. In this work, we create a multilingual anonymization benchmark in ten languages, using a machine translation methodology that preserves the original annotations and renders city and people names in a culturally and contextually appropriate form in each target language. Our evaluation study with medical professionals confirms the quality of the translations, both in general and with respect to the translation and adaptation of personal information. Our benchmark with over 2,500 annotations of personal information can be used in many applications, including training annotators, validating annotations across institutions without legal complications, and helping improve the performance of automatic personal information detection. We make our benchmark and annotation guidelines available for further research.

2024

We present the first comprehensive set of guidelines for German Abstract Meaning Representation (Deutsche AMR, DeAMR) along with an annotated corpus of 400 DeAMR. Taking English AMR (EnAMR) as our starting point, we propose significant adaptations to faithfully represent the structure and semantics of German, focusing particularly on verb frames, compound words, and modality. We validate our annotation through inter-annotator agreement and further evaluate our corpus with a comparison of structural divergences between EnAMR and DeAMR on parallel sentences, replicating previous work that finds both cases of cross-lingual structural alignment and cases of meaningful linguistic divergence. Finally, we fine-tune state-of-the-art multi-lingual and cross-lingual AMR parsers on our corpus and find that, while our small corpus is insufficient to produce quality output, there is a need to continue develop and evaluate against gold non-English AMR data.