Automatic Named Entity Obfuscation in Speech

Sharing data containing personal information often requires its anonymization, even when consent for sharing was obtained from the data originator. While approaches exist for automated anonymization of text, the area is not as thoroughly explored in speech. This work focuses on identifying, replacing and inserting replacement named entities synthesized using voice cloning into original audio thereby retaining prosodic information while reducing the likelihood of deanonymization. The approach employs a novel named entity recognition (NER) system built directly on speech by training HuBERT (Hsu et al., 2021) using the English speech NER dataset (Yadav et al., 2020). Name substitutes are found using a masked language model and are synthesized using text to speech voice cloning (Eren and Team, 2021), upon which the substitute named entities are re-inserted into the original text. The approach is prototyped on a sample of the LibriSpeech corpus (Panayotov et al., 2015) with each step evaluated individually.