Audio De-identification - a New Entity Recognition Task
Ido Cohn, Itay Laish, Genady Beryozkin, Gang Li, Izhak Shafran, Idan Szpektor, Tzvika Hartman, Avinatan Hassidim, Yossi Matias
Abstract
Named Entity Recognition (NER) has been mostly studied in the context of written text. Specifically, NER is an important step in de-identification (de-ID) of medical records, many of which are recorded conversations between a patient and a doctor. In such recordings, audio spans with personal information should be redacted, similar to the redaction of sensitive character spans in de-ID for written text. The application of NER in the context of audio de-identification has yet to be fully investigated. To this end, we define the task of audio de-ID, in which audio spans with entity mentions should be detected. We then present our pipeline for this task, which involves Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), NER on the transcript text, and text-to-audio alignment. Finally, we introduce a novel metric for audio de-ID and a new evaluation benchmark consisting of a large labeled segment of the Switchboard and Fisher audio datasets and detail our pipeline’s results on it.- Anthology ID:
- N19-2025
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Industry Papers)
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2019
- Address:
- Minneapolis, Minnesota
- Editors:
- Anastassia Loukina, Michelle Morales, Rohit Kumar
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 197–204
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/N19-2025
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/N19-2025
- Cite (ACL):
- Ido Cohn, Itay Laish, Genady Beryozkin, Gang Li, Izhak Shafran, Idan Szpektor, Tzvika Hartman, Avinatan Hassidim, and Yossi Matias. 2019. Audio De-identification - a New Entity Recognition Task. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Industry Papers), pages 197–204, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Audio De-identification - a New Entity Recognition Task (Cohn et al., NAACL 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/N19-2025.pdf