Sentence-level Privacy for Document Embeddings

Abstract: 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 $\epsilon$-SentDP document embeddings. This guarantees that any single sentence in a document can be substituted with any other sentence while keeping the embedding $\epsilon$-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.