We propose a method to protect the privacy of search engine users by decomposing the queries using semantically related and unrelated distractor terms. Instead of a single query, the search engine receives multiple decomposed query terms. Next, we reconstruct the search results relevant to the original query term by aggregating the search results retrieved for the decomposed query terms. We show that the word embeddings learnt using a distributed representation learning method can be used to find semantically related and distractor query terms. We derive the relationship between the obfuscity achieved through the proposed query anonymisation method and the reconstructability of the original search results using the decomposed queries. We analytically study the risk of discovering the search engine users’ information intents under the proposed query obfuscation method, and empirically evaluate its robustness against clustering-based attacks. Our experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately reconstruct the search results for user queries, without compromising the privacy of the search engine users.

Embedding entities and relations of a knowledge graph in a low-dimensional space has shown impressive performance in predicting missing links between entities. Although progresses have been achieved, existing methods are heuristically motivated and theoretical understanding of such embeddings is comparatively underdeveloped. This paper extends the random walk model of word embeddings to Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGEs) to derive a scoring function that evaluates the strength of a relation R between two entities h (head) and t (tail). Moreover, we show that marginal loss minimisation, a popular objective used in much prior work in KGE, follows naturally from the log-likelihood ratio maximisation under the probabilities estimated from the KGEs according to our theoretical relationship. We propose a learning objective motivated by the theoretical analysis to learn KGEs from a given knowledge graph. Using the derived objective, accurate KGEs are learnt from FB15K237 and WN18RR benchmark datasets, providing empirical evidence in support of the theory.

Cross-lingual word embeddings (CLWE) underlie many multilingual natural language processing systems, often through orthogonal transformations of pre-trained monolingual embeddings. However, orthogonal mapping only works on language pairs whose embeddings are naturally isomorphic. For non-isomorphic pairs, our method (Iterative Normalization) transforms monolingual embeddings to make orthogonal alignment easier by simultaneously enforcing that (1) individual word vectors are unit length, and (2) each language’s average vector is zero. Iterative Normalization consistently improves word translation accuracy of three CLWE methods, with the largest improvement observed on English-Japanese (from 2% to 44% test accuracy).