Challenge: De-identification is the task of detecting protected health information (PHI) in medical text.
Approach: They propose to create shareable representations of medical text that contain no PHI and can be shared between organizations to create unified datasets for training de-identification models.
Outcome: The proposed representation allows training a simple LSTM-CRF model to an F1 score of 97.4%.

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A Semi-supervised Approach for De-identification of Swedish Clinical Text (2020.lrec-1)

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Challenge: An abundance of electronic health records (EHRs) is produced every day within healthcare.
Approach: They propose a semi-supervised method for automatically creating high-quality training data for de-identification using annotated data for training and annotations that are costly in time and human resources.
Outcome: The proposed method improves recall from 84.75% to 89.20% without sacrificing precision to the same extent, dropping from 95.73% to 94.20%.
Building a De-identification System for Real Swedish Clinical Text Using Pseudonymised Clinical Text (D19-62)

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Challenge: Several ethical and scientific issues arise regarding the balance between maintaining patient confidentiality and the need for wider application of trained models.
Approach: They propose to use pseudonymised clinical text as training data to de-identify real clinical text in other hospitals.
Outcome: The proposed model performed better for some PHI information than the standard model and poor performance on Location and Health Care Unit information.
Generating Synthetic Free-text Medical Records with Low Re-identification Risk using Masked Language Modeling (2025.naacl-srw)

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Challenge: Existing methods to generate medical records using Causal Language Modelling are limited due to privacy concerns.
Approach: They propose a method for generating medical records using Masked Language Modelling using Causal language models.
Outcome: The proposed method produces high-quality synthetic data with a re-identification risk of only 3.5% and a patient recall of 96%.
Generalizing Clinical De-identification Models by Privacy-safe Data Augmentation using GPT-4 (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: De-identification (de-ID) is critical for patient confidentiality in clinical data management due to the difficulty of retaining training corpora and labeling standards vary across institutions.
Approach: They propose to exploit GPT-4 for data augmentation through one-shot and zero-shot prompts to exploit the problem of PHI leakage by redacting PHI before processing.
Outcome: The proposed approach significantly improves on three types of F1 scores in cross-dataset testing.
Privacy-preserving Neural Representations of Text (D18-1)

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Challenge: a specific type of attack is used to characterize the privacy of neural representations for NLP tasks, in the context of privacy protection.
Approach: They propose several defense methods based on modified training objectives and characterize the tradeoff between privacy and the utility of neural representations.
Outcome: The proposed defenses improve the privacy of neural representations and characterize the tradeoff between privacy and utility of representations.
Data-Constrained Synthesis of Training Data for De-Identification (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: sensitive domains lack widely available datasets due to privacy risks . recent studies have focused on evaluating the privacy of the synthetic text .
Approach: They domain-adapt LLMs to clinical domain and generate synthetic clinical texts . they then generate NER models that can be annotated with tags for PII .
Outcome: The proposed model performs better than the original model using smaller datasets.
Neural Text Sanitization with Explicit Measures of Privacy Risk (2022.aacl-main)

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Challenge: Personal data, also known as Personally Identifiable Information (PII), often abound in text documents.
Approach: They propose a method for text sanitization that uses a neural entity recognizer to detect and classify potential personal identifiers and a classifier trained on labelled data to determine which entities to mask .
Outcome: The proposed approach masks all personal identifiers and thereby conceals the identity of the individuals mentioned in the document.
Generating Continuous Representations of Medical Texts (N18-5)

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Challenge: Obtaining a good representation for medical texts may prove vital to building more sophisticated generative, discriminative or semantic models for the field.
Approach: They propose an autoencoder that generates medical texts while learning an informative, continuous representation with discriminative features.
Outcome: The proposed system generates medical texts while learning an informative, continuous representation with discriminative features.
Revisiting De-Identification of Electronic Medical Records: Evaluation of Within- and Cross-Hospital Generalization (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: De-identification is a natural language processing task to detect and remove the protected health information (PHI) from electronic medical records (EMRs).
Approach: They propose a de-identification dataset comprising EMRs from three hospitals in China and use it to establish a benchmark for evaluating both within- and cross-hospital generalization.
Outcome: The proposed model with almost perfect within-hospital performance struggles when transferred across hospitals.
Closing the Gap: Joint De-Identification and Concept Extraction in the Clinical Domain (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Recent studies show that de-identification is effective in the clinical domain but not in the downstream tasks.
Approach: They propose a stacked model with restricted access to privacy sensitive information and a multitask model to investigate the effect of de-identification on clinical concept extraction.
Outcome: The proposed model is stacked with restricted access to privacy sensitive information and a multitask model.

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