Query Obfuscation Semantic Decomposition



Bollegala, Danushka, Machide, Tomoya and Kawarabayashi, Ken-ichi
(2019) Query Obfuscation Semantic Decomposition. CoRR, abs/19.

[img] Text
1909.05819v1.pdf - Submitted version

Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

We propose a method to protect the privacy of search engine users by decomposing the queries using semantically \emph{related} and unrelated \emph{distractor} terms. Instead of a single query, the search engine receives multiple decomposed query terms. Next, we reconstruct the search results relevant to the original query term by aggregating the search results retrieved for the decomposed query terms. We show that the word embeddings learnt using a distributed representation learning method can be used to find semantically related and distractor query terms. We derive the relationship between the \emph{obfuscity} achieved through the proposed query anonymisation method and the \emph{reconstructability} of the original search results using the decomposed queries. We analytically study the risk of discovering the search engine users' information intents under the proposed query obfuscation method, and empirically evaluate its robustness against clustering-based attacks. Our experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately reconstruct the search results for user queries, without compromising the privacy of the search engine users.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: Accepted to Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-2022)
Uncontrolled Keywords: cs.CL, cs.CL, cs.CR, cs.IR
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 11 Dec 2019 13:32
Last Modified: 19 Jan 2023 00:13
Related URLs:
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3065913