Towards Privacy by Design in Learner Corpora Research: A Case of On-the-fly Pseudonymization of Swedish Learner Essays
This article reports on an ongoing project aiming at automatization of pseudonymization of learner essays. The process includes three steps: identification of personal information in an unstructured text, labeling for a category, and pseudonymization. We experiment with rule-based methods for detection of 15 categories out of the suggested 19 (Megyesi et al., 2018) that we deem important and/or doable with automatic approaches. For the detection and labeling steps,we use resources covering personal names, geographic names, company and university names and others. For the pseudonymization step, we replace the item using another item of the same type from the above-mentioned resources. Evaluation of the detection and labeling steps are made on a set of manually anonymized essays. The results are promising and show that 89{\%} of the personal information can be successfully identified in learner data, and annotated correctly with an inter-annotator agreement of 86{\%} measured as Fleiss kappa and Krippendorff{'}s alpha.
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