Massive amounts of contributed content -- including traditional literature,
blogs, music, videos, reviews and tweets -- are available on the Internet
today, with authors numbering in many millions. Textual information, such as
product or service reviews, is an important and increasingly popular type of
content that is being used as a foundation of many trendy community-based
reviewing sites, such as TripAdvisor and Yelp. Some recent results have shown
that, due partly to their specialized/topical nature, sets of reviews authored
by the same person are readily linkable based on simple stylometric features.
In practice, this means that individuals who author more than a few reviews
under different accounts (whether within one site or across multiple sites) can
be linked, which represents a significant loss of privacy.
In this paper, we start by showing that the problem is actually worse than
previously believed. We then explore ways to mitigate authorship linkability in
community-based reviewing. We first attempt to harness the global power of
crowdsourcing by engaging random strangers into the process of re-writing
reviews. As our empirical results (obtained from Amazon Mechanical Turk)
clearly demonstrate, crowdsourcing yields impressively sensible reviews that
reflect sufficiently different stylometric characteristics such that prior
stylometric linkability techniques become largely ineffective. We also consider
using machine translation to automatically re-write reviews. Contrary to what
was previously believed, our results show that translation decreases authorship
linkability as the number of intermediate languages grows. Finally, we explore
the combination of crowdsourcing and machine translation and report on the
results.

在社区评论领域，我们发现同一人编写的评论集合基于简单的文体特征就能链接起来从而导致明显的隐私泄露问题，而本文则提出了结合大众智慧和机器翻译的方法，使得评论样式不同从而达到了减少作者链接度的目的。