De-identification of Privacy-related Entities in Job Postings

Abstract

De-identification is the task of detecting privacy-related entities in text, such as person names, emails and contact data. It has been well-studied within the medical domain. The need for deidentification technology is increasing, as privacy-preserving data handling is in high demand in many domains. In this paper, we focus on job postings. We present JOBSTACK, a new corpus for de-identification of personal data in job vacancies on Stackoverflow. We introduce baselines, comparing Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) and Transformer models. To improve upon these baselines, we experiment with contextualized embeddings and distantly related auxiliary data via multi-task learning. Our results show that auxiliary data improves de-identification performance. Surprisingly, vanilla BERT turned out to be more effective than a BERT model trained on other portions of Stackoverflow.