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Neural Linguistic Steganography

# Neural Linguistic Steganography

Zachary M. Ziegler*, Yuntian Deng*, Alexander M. Rush

* Zachary M. Ziegler and Yuntian Deng contributed equally.

First arXiv submission: September 3, 2019 · EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019

Published version: November 2019. The publication and preprint records below retain their own dates and identifiers.

Combines arithmetic coding with large pretrained language models to encode secret information into generated text while closely matching the model's distribution. GPT-2 experiments evaluate information capacity, statistical divergence, and human judgments of contextual continuations, and demonstrate encoding natural-language messages into unrelated cover text.

[Read paper ↗](https://aclanthology.org/D19-1115/) · [PDF ↗](https://aclanthology.org/D19-1115.pdf) · [Code ↗](https://github.com/harvardnlp/NeuralSteganography)

## Relationship to Neural Linguistic Steganography

The original paper associated with this research site and its STEGASURAS implementation. The published paper links steganography.live and the official repository.

## Scope and limitations

The statistical experiments measure divergence from the language model, not an inaccessible true human-language distribution. Truncation and temperature choices create a practical trade-off between human plausibility and distribution matching.

## Cite this paper

### Published version

Zachary M. Ziegler, Yuntian Deng, Alexander M. Rush. [Neural Linguistic Steganography](https://aclanthology.org/D19-1115/). Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), 2019

[Published version BibTeX](https://steganography.live/reading-list/papers/neural-linguistic-steganography/publication.bib) · [Published version CSL-JSON](https://steganography.live/reading-list/papers/neural-linguistic-steganography/publication.csl.json)
Show BibTeX`@inproceedings{neural-linguistic-steganography-publication,
  title = {{Neural Linguistic Steganography}},
  author = {Ziegler, Zachary M. and Deng, Yuntian and Rush, Alexander M.},
  year = {2019},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/D19-1115},
  pages = {1210--1215},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/D19-1115/}
}
`

### arXiv preprint

Zachary M. Ziegler, Yuntian Deng, Alexander M. Rush. [Neural Linguistic Steganography](https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.01496v1). arXiv:1909.01496. First submission: September 3, 2019.

This citation records the first arXiv version and its original title. The version-specific link distinguishes it from later revisions; cite the version supporting your claim.

[arXiv preprint BibTeX](https://steganography.live/reading-list/papers/neural-linguistic-steganography/preprint.bib) · [arXiv preprint CSL-JSON](https://steganography.live/reading-list/papers/neural-linguistic-steganography/preprint.csl.json)
Show BibTeX`@misc{neural-linguistic-steganography-preprint,
  title = {{Neural Linguistic Steganography}},
  author = {Ziegler, Zachary M. and Deng, Yuntian and Rush, Alexander M.},
  year = {2019},
  publisher = {arXiv},
  eprint = {1909.01496v1},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.01496v1}
}
`

## Primary sources

- [Publication title, venue, November 2019, DOI and pages.](https://aclanthology.org/D19-1115/)

- [Title page establishes full author names and equal contribution; sections 3–4 support method, evaluations and limitations; page 2 links site and code.](https://aclanthology.org/D19-1115.pdf)

- [Only listed version is v1, September 3, 2019.](https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.01496)

- [Official implementation identifies paper and links steganography.live; June 2025 compatibility update is separately credited.](https://github.com/harvardnlp/NeuralSteganography)

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