Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ramesh, Krithika, Gandhi, Nupoor, Madaan, Pulkit, Bauer, Lisa, Peris, Charith, Field, Anjalie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08327
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917800151351296
author Ramesh, Krithika
Gandhi, Nupoor
Madaan, Pulkit
Bauer, Lisa
Peris, Charith
Field, Anjalie
author_facet Ramesh, Krithika
Gandhi, Nupoor
Madaan, Pulkit
Bauer, Lisa
Peris, Charith
Field, Anjalie
contents The difficulty of anonymizing text data hinders the development and deployment of NLP in high-stakes domains that involve private data, such as healthcare and social services. Poorly anonymized sensitive data cannot be easily shared with annotators or external researchers, nor can it be used to train public models. In this work, we explore the feasibility of using synthetic data generated from differentially private language models in place of real data to facilitate the development of NLP in these domains without compromising privacy. In contrast to prior work, we generate synthetic data for real high-stakes domains, and we propose and conduct use-inspired evaluations to assess data quality. Our results show that prior simplistic evaluations have failed to highlight utility, privacy, and fairness issues in the synthetic data. Overall, our work underscores the need for further improvements to synthetic data generation for it to be a viable way to enable privacy-preserving data sharing.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_08327
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating Differentially Private Synthetic Data Generation in High-Stakes Domains
Ramesh, Krithika
Gandhi, Nupoor
Madaan, Pulkit
Bauer, Lisa
Peris, Charith
Field, Anjalie
Computation and Language
The difficulty of anonymizing text data hinders the development and deployment of NLP in high-stakes domains that involve private data, such as healthcare and social services. Poorly anonymized sensitive data cannot be easily shared with annotators or external researchers, nor can it be used to train public models. In this work, we explore the feasibility of using synthetic data generated from differentially private language models in place of real data to facilitate the development of NLP in these domains without compromising privacy. In contrast to prior work, we generate synthetic data for real high-stakes domains, and we propose and conduct use-inspired evaluations to assess data quality. Our results show that prior simplistic evaluations have failed to highlight utility, privacy, and fairness issues in the synthetic data. Overall, our work underscores the need for further improvements to synthetic data generation for it to be a viable way to enable privacy-preserving data sharing.
title Evaluating Differentially Private Synthetic Data Generation in High-Stakes Domains
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08327