Proceedings chapter
OA Policy
English

CONORM-DEID : Robustness Evaluation of a Multilingual De-Identification System for Clinical Texts

Presented atProceedings of MIE 2026, Genoa (Italy), May 25-28, 2026
Published inGiacomini, M., Delgado, J., Arvanitis, T.N. et al. (Ed.), Opening the Personal Gate between Technology and Health Care, p. 929-933
PublisherAmsterdam : IOS Press
Collection
  • Studies in Health Technology and Informatics; 336
Publication date2026-05-21
Abstract

Clinical narratives contain rich, detailed information that is essential for medical research but often locked behind privacy constraints due to the presence of personally identifiable information. To enable secondary use while protecting patient confidentiality, these texts must undergo de-identification. Because even a few missed instances can lead to disclosure, systems must achieve high recall. In this work, we present CONORM-DEID, a multilingual model for clinical text de-identification, and investigate how large-scale synthetic pre-training and the availability of human-annotated data impact model robustness in both English and French. We compare models trained from scratch with models incorporating synthetic pre-training across high- and low-data settings. All models trained from scratch achieve high F1-scores (97%+), but robustness, measured as precision at 99% recall, improves only when synthetic pre-training is followed by substantial human fine-tuning. When annotated data are limited, pre-training instead reduces performance, indicating negative transfer. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ds4dh/multilingual_deidentification.

Keywords
  • CONORM
  • Clinical NLP
  • De-identification
  • LLMs
Citation (ISO format)
YAZDANI, Anthony et al. CONORM-DEID : Robustness Evaluation of a Multilingual De-Identification System for Clinical Texts. In: Opening the Personal Gate between Technology and Health Care. Giacomini, M., Delgado, J., Arvanitis, T.N. et al. (Ed.). Genoa (Italy). Amsterdam : IOS Press, 2026. p. 929–933. (Studies in Health Technology and Informatics) doi: 10.3233/SHTI260315
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Proceedings chapter (Published version)
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Additional URL for this publicationhttps://ebooks.iospress.nl/doi/10.3233/SHTI260315
ISBN978-1-64368-661-5
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Technical informations

Creation11/08/2026 07:36:59
First validation25/08/2026 08:29:36
Update25/08/2026 08:29:36
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