  Large-scale clinical data is invaluable to driving many computational
scientific advances today. However, understandable concerns regarding patient
privacy hinder the open dissemination of such data and give rise to suboptimal
siloed research. De-identification methods attempt to address these concerns
but were shown to be susceptible to adversarial attacks. In this work, we focus
on the vast amounts of unstructured natural language data stored in clinical
notes and propose to automatically generate synthetic clinical notes that are
more amenable to sharing using generative models trained on real de-identified
records. To evaluate the merit of such notes, we measure both their privacy
preservation properties as well as utility in training clinical NLP models.
Experiments using neural language models yield notes whose utility is close to
that of the real ones in some clinical NLP tasks, yet leave ample room for
future improvements.
