Disclose Models, Hide the Data - How to Make Use of Confidential Corpora without Seeing Sensitive Raw Data

Confidential corpora from the medical, enterprise, security or intelligence domains often contain sensitive raw data which lead to severe restrictions as far as the public accessibility and distribution of such language resources are concerned. The enforcement of strict mechanisms of data protection consitutes a serious barrier for progress in language technology (products) in such domains, since these data are extremely rare or even unavailable for scientists and developers not directly involved in the creation and maintenance of such resources. In order to by-pass this problem, we here propose to distribute trained language models which were derived from such resources as a substitute for the original confidential raw data which remain hidden to the outside world. As an example, we exploit the access-protected German-language medical FRAMED corpus from which we generate and distribute models for sentence splitting, tokenization and POS tagging based on software taken from OPENNLP, NLTK and JCORE, our own UIMA-based text analytics pipeline.