Labeling without Seeing? Blind Annotation for Privacy-Preserving Entity Resolution

TL;DR

This paper introduces a privacy-preserving blind annotation protocol for entity resolution using homomorphic encryption, enabling collaborative labeling without exposing sensitive data, and demonstrates its feasibility with high accuracy in experiments.

Contribution

It presents the first privacy-preserving ground truth generation method for entity resolution using homomorphic encryption and a domain-specific language for ease of use.

Findings

Achieves over 90% f-measure compared to real ground truths.

Provides rigorous privacy guarantees for data owners.

Demonstrates practical feasibility through empirical experiments.

Abstract

The entity resolution problem requires finding pairs across datasets that belong to different owners but refer to the same entity in the real world. To train and evaluate solutions (either rule-based or machine-learning-based) to the entity resolution problem, generating a ground truth dataset with entity pairs or clusters is needed. However, such a data annotation process involves humans as domain oracles to review the plaintext data for all candidate record pairs from different parties, which inevitably infringes the privacy of data owners, especially in privacy-sensitive cases like medical records. To the best of our knowledge, there is no prior work on privacy-preserving ground truth dataset generation, especially in the domain of entity resolution. We propose a novel blind annotation protocol based on homomorphic encryption that allows domain oracles to collaboratively label ground truths without sharing data in plaintext with other parties. In addition, we design a domain-specific easy-to-use language that hides the sophisticated underlying homomorphic encryption layer. Rigorous proof of the privacy guarantee is provided and our empirical experiments via an annotation simulator indicate the feasibility of our privacy-preserving protocol (f-measure on average achieves more than 90\% compared with the real ground truths).