Sentence-level Privacy for Document Embeddings
User language data can contain highly sensitive personal content. As such, it is imperative to offer users a strong and interpretable privacy guarantee when learning from their data. In this work, we propose SentDP: pure local differential privacy at the sentence level for a single user document. We propose a novel technique, DeepCandidate, that combines concepts from robust statistics and language modeling to produce high-dimensional, general-purpose ϵ-SentDP document embeddings. This guarantees that any single sentence in a document can be substituted with any other sentence while keeping the embedding ϵ-indistinguishable. Our experiments indicate that these private document embeddings are useful for downstream tasks like sentiment analysis and topic classification and even outperform baseline methods with weaker guarantees like word-level Metric DP.
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