Query Obfuscation by Semantic Decomposition

Bollegala, Danushka ORCID: 0000-0003-4476-7003, Machide, Tomoya and Kawarabayashi, Ken-ichi (2022) Query Obfuscation by Semantic Decomposition In: Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), 2022-6-20 - 2022-6-25, Marseille, France.

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Abstract

We propose a method to protect the privacy of search engine users by decomposing the queries using semantically related and unrelated 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 obfuscity achieved through the proposed query anonymisation method and the 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:	Conference Item (Unspecified)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Query Obfuscation, Information Retrieval, Word Embeddings, Reconstrutability
Divisions:	Faculty of Science & Engineering > School of Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	14 Apr 2022 13:58
Last Modified:	23 May 2026 06:40
DOI:	10.63317/4u6q3ngd2z45
Related Websites:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3152961
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