Grandma Karl

Umbrella project

Grandma Karl is 27 years old: Automatic pseudonymization of research data

Official project website: https://mormor-karl.github.io/

Background

Accessibility of research data is critical for advances in many research fields, but textual data often cannot be shared due to the presence of personal and sensitive information, e.g names, political opinions. GDPR suggests pseudonymization as a solution, but we need to learn more about it before adopting it for manipulation of research data.

Project description

This environment targets several aspects of pseudonymization, aiming to advance Sweden's work on open access to research data:  

1. algorithms to automatically detect, label and pseudonymize personal identifiers in freely written texts (essays/blogs), focusing on linguistic challenges such as spelling errors, ambiguous entities, semantic constraints etc 

2. analysis of type and number of personal identifiers versus acceptable protection, followed by reidentification tests to ensure that pseudonymization is effective 

3. analysis of the effects of pseudonymization on research data, e.g on the readability of the resulting texts, their utility for answering the intended research questions and applicability to practical scenarios (e.g language assessment) 

We will use Swedish learner-written essays, collected and manually annotated by us, and generalize to social media domain (through available corpora). Natural Language Processing, machine learning, neural networks, word embeddings are some of the methods we will work with. 

Tools and datasets will be openly shared; theoretical and methodological insights will be discussed in articles. 

Vision and planning

2023 -- employment of PhD students, contracts, data access, reannotation of SweLL-pilot to SweLL-gold.

2024 -- employment of PhD students, workshop at EACL 2024, CEFR-annotating SweLL-gold, development of personal information detection models. 

2025 -- further model development, research on the role of LLMs for pseudonymization and pseudonym generation, reidentification experiments, collection of fictive texts.

2026 -- work on the collected texts, further LLM research, experiments with how personal information is perceived by language models.

2027 --

2028 --

 

Departments/organizations

  • University of Gothenburg, Dpt. of Swedish, Multilinguality, Language Technology
  • University of Gothenburg, Dpt. of Philosophy, Linguistics, and Theory of Science
  • Lund University, Dpt. of Computer Science
  • University of Helsinki, Dpt. of Nordic languages

Publications

  • Ingo Siegert, Maria Irena Szawerna, Khalid Choukri, Simon Dobnik, Paweł Kamocki, Therese Lindström Tiedemann, Pierre Lison, Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, Ildikó Pilán, Lisa Södergård, Kossay Talmoudi, Elena Volodina, Xuan-Son Vu. 2026. Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Legal and Ethical Issues in Human Language Technologies and Computational Approaches to Language Data Pseudonymization, Anonymization, De-identification, and Data Privacy (LEGAL2026 and CALD-pseudo 2026) @ LREC 2026. [pdf]
  • Maria Irena Szawerna, Simon Dobnik. 2026. Birds of a Feather: Do Embedding Representations of Personal Information Flock Together?, i Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Legal and Ethical Issues in Human Language Technologies and Computational Approaches to Language Data Pseudonymization, Anonymization, De-identification, and Data Privacy (LEGAL2026 and CALD-pseudo 2026) @ LREC 2026
  • Maria Irena Szawerna, Jacob Lee Suchardt. 2026. Fill-in-the-Blanks: Automatic Generation and Evaluation of Language Models' Pseudonyms for English and Swedish Texts, i Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2026). [pdf]
  • Maria Irena Szawerna, David Alfter, Elena Volodina. 2025. Annotating Personal Information in Swedish Texts with SPARV, i Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Language Models for Digital Humanities,11 September, 2025 Varna, Bulgaria / Isuri Nanomi Arachchige, Francesca Frontini, Ruslan Mitkov and Paul Rayson (eds.). [pdf]
  • Therese Lindström Tiedemann, Lisa Södergård, Elena Volodina, Simon Dobnik, Maria Irena Szawerna, Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, Xuan-Son Vu. 2025. Om mormor Karl sägs vara 27 år gammal, vad säger det om skribenten? En presentation om att identifiera och ersätta identifierande element i språkvetenskapliga forskningsdata, in Abstractsamling. Svenskans beskrivning 40 (Svebe40), Workshop om Pseudonymisering inom språkvetenskap, 26–28 maj 2025, Stockholm. 
  • Elena Volodina, Simon Dobnik, Therese Lindström Tiedemann, Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, Maria Irena Szawerna, Lisa Södergård, Xuan-Son Vu. 2025. Towards shared standards for pseudonymization of research data, in Proceedings of the Huminfra Conference (HiC 2025), Stockholm. [pdf]
  • Nikolai Ilinykh, Maria Irena Szawerna. 2025. “I Need More Context and an English Translation”: Analysing How LLMs Identify Personal Information in Komi, Polish, and English. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Resources and Representations for Under-Resourced Languages and Domains (RESOURCEFUL-2025). [pdf]
  • Maria Irena Szawerna, Simon Dobnik, Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, and Elena Volodina. 2025. The Devil’s in the Details: the Detailedness of Classes Influences Personal Information Detection and Labeling. In Proceedings of the The Joint 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies (NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025). [pdf]
  • Maria Irena Szawerna, Simon Dobnik, Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, Elena Volodina. 2024. Swedish Learner Essays Revisited: Further Insights into Detecting Personal Information. An abstract at the Tenth Swedish Language Technology Conference (SLTC), Linköping, Sweden. [pdf]
  • Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, Simon Dobnik, Therese Lindström Tiedemann, Maria Irena Szawerna and Elena Volodina. 2024. Name Biases in Automated Essay Assessment. An abstract at the 28th International Congress of Onomastic Sciences - University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland. [link]
  • Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, Simon Dobnik, Maria Irena Szawerna, Therese Lindström Tiedemann and Elena Volodina. 2024. Did the Names I Used within My Essay Affect My Score? Diagnosing Name Biases in Automated Essay Scoring. In Proceedings of the the EACL workshop Computational Approaches to Language Data Pseudonymization (CALD-pseudo-2024). EACL, Malta, 2024. Association for Language Technology. [pdf]
  • Maria Irena Szawerna, Simon Dobnik, Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, Therese Lindström Tiedemann and Elena Volodina. 2024. Detecting Personal Identifiable Information in Swedish Learner Essays. In Proceedings of the the EACL workshop Computational Approaches to Language Data Pseudonymization (CALD-pseudo-2024). EACL, Malta, 2024. Association for Language Technology. [pdf]
  • Elena Volodina , Simon Dobnik, Therese Lindström Tiedemann, Xuan-Son Vu, David Alfter, Maria Irena Szawerna, Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez. 2024. Proceedings of the EACL workshop on Computational Approaches to Language Data Pseudonymization (CALD-pseudo), Editors. EACL, Malta, 2024. Association for Language Technology. [pdf]
  • Maria Irena Szawerna, Simon Dobnik, Therese Lindström Tiedemann, Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, Xuan-Son Vu and Elena Volodina. 2024. Pseudonymization Categories across Domain Boundaries. In Proceedings of LREC-Coling 2024. [pdf]
  • Elena Volodina, Simon Dobnik, Therese Lindström Tiedemann and Xuan-Son Vy. 2023. Grandma Karl is 27 Years old – Research Agenda for Pseudonymization of Research Data. Proceedings of the 2023 IEEE Ninth International Conference on Big Data Computing Service and Applications (BigDataService), Workshop on Big Data and Machine Learning with Privacy Enhancing Tech. Athens, Greece.  [pdf]

Project duration

–

Project members

  • Elena Volodina (Project leader)
    elena.volodina@svenska.gu.se
  • Simon Dobnik (Researcher)
    simon.dobnik@gu.se
    Institutionen för filosofi, lingvistik och vetenskapsteori
  • Xuan-Son Vu (Researcher)
    xuan-son.vu@umu.se
    Institutionen för datavetenskap, Lunds universitet
  • Therese Lindström Tiedemann (Researcher)
    therese.lindstromtiedemann@helsinki.fi
    "Finskugriska och nordiska avdelningen, Humanistiska fakulteten, Helsingfors universitet"
  • Maria Irena Szawerna (PhD student)
    maria.szawerna@gu.se
  • Lisa Södergård (PhD student)
    lisa.sodergard@helsinki.fi
    "Finskugriska och nordiska avdelningen, Humanistiska fakulteten, Helsingfors universitet"

Funding

  • Vetenskapsrådet (2022-02311)

Research topics

  • pseudonymization
  • research data
  • språkteknologi
  • allmän lingvistik
  • svenska som andraspråk
  • pseudonymisering
  • dataintegritet
  • forskningsdata

Project type

  • Research project
  • Externally funded
Page manager: Elena Volodina
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Last update: 2026-05-26