InvBERT: Reconstructing Text from Contextualized Word Embeddings by inverting the BERT pipeline

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Kugler, Kai, Münker, Simon, Höhmann, Johannes, Rettinger, Achim
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2021
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author Kugler, Kai
Münker, Simon
Höhmann, Johannes
Rettinger, Achim
author_facet Kugler, Kai
Münker, Simon
Höhmann, Johannes
Rettinger, Achim
contents Digital Humanities and Computational Literary Studies apply text mining methods to investigate literature. Such automated approaches enable quantitative studies on large corpora which would not be feasible by manual inspection alone. However, due to copyright restrictions, the availability of relevant digitized literary works is limited. Derived Text Formats (DTFs) have been proposed as a solution. Here, textual materials are transformed in such a way that copyright-critical features are removed, but that the use of certain analytical methods remains possible. Contextualized word embeddings produced by transformer-encoders (like BERT) are promising candidates for DTFs because they allow for state-of-the-art performance on various analytical tasks and, at first sight, do not disclose the original text. However, in this paper we demonstrate that under certain conditions the reconstruction of the original copyrighted text becomes feasible and its publication in the form of contextualized token representations is not safe. Our attempts to invert BERT suggest, that publishing the encoder as a black box together with the contextualized embeddings is critical, since it allows to generate data to train a decoder with a reconstruction accuracy sufficient to violate copyright laws.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2109_10104
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle InvBERT: Reconstructing Text from Contextualized Word Embeddings by inverting the BERT pipeline
Kugler, Kai
Münker, Simon
Höhmann, Johannes
Rettinger, Achim
Computation and Language
Digital Humanities and Computational Literary Studies apply text mining methods to investigate literature. Such automated approaches enable quantitative studies on large corpora which would not be feasible by manual inspection alone. However, due to copyright restrictions, the availability of relevant digitized literary works is limited. Derived Text Formats (DTFs) have been proposed as a solution. Here, textual materials are transformed in such a way that copyright-critical features are removed, but that the use of certain analytical methods remains possible. Contextualized word embeddings produced by transformer-encoders (like BERT) are promising candidates for DTFs because they allow for state-of-the-art performance on various analytical tasks and, at first sight, do not disclose the original text. However, in this paper we demonstrate that under certain conditions the reconstruction of the original copyrighted text becomes feasible and its publication in the form of contextualized token representations is not safe. Our attempts to invert BERT suggest, that publishing the encoder as a black box together with the contextualized embeddings is critical, since it allows to generate data to train a decoder with a reconstruction accuracy sufficient to violate copyright laws.
title InvBERT: Reconstructing Text from Contextualized Word Embeddings by inverting the BERT pipeline
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.10104