Toward Regulatory Compliance: A few-shot Learning Approach to Extract Processing Activities

Abstract: The widespread use of mobile applications has driven the growth of the industry, with companies relying heavily on user data for services like targeted advertising and personalized offerings. In this context, privacy regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) play a crucial role. One of the GDPR requirements is the maintenance of a Record of Processing Activities (RoPA) by companies. RoPA encompasses various details, including the description of data processing activities, their purposes, types of data involved, and other relevant external entities. Small app-developing companies face challenges in meeting such compliance requirements due to resource limitations and tight timelines. To aid these developers and prevent fines, we propose a method to generate segments of RoPA from user-authored usage scenarios using LLMs. Our method employs few-shot learning with GPT-3.5 Turbo to summarize usage scenarios and generate RoPA segments. We evaluate different factors that can affect few-shot learning performance consistency for our summarization task, including the number of examples in few-shot learning prompts, repetition, and order permutation of examples in the prompts. Our findings highlight the significant influence of the number of examples in prompts on summarization F1 scores, while demonstrating negligible variability in F1 scores across multiple prompt repetitions. Our prompts achieve successful summarization of processing activities with an average 70% ROUGE-L F1 score. Finally, we discuss avenues for improving results through manual evaluation of the generated summaries.