"I've wondered what it would take to write an anonymizing tool that would strip identifying patterns from the sentences."
Peter Wayner came up with a technique called "Mimic Functions" [1] that could (at least in principle) change a file so that it assumes some statistical properties of a different file.
Unfortunately, it's easier said than done. One problem is that the sender doesn't know exactly which statistical tests would be used by the attacker, so while mimic functions could be devised to emulate certain statistical properties of a given file, it may be impossible to mimic all the statistical properties of any but the most trivial file -- especially if you want the result to make sense to a human reader. It might fool a machine, though.
Peter Wayner came up with a technique called "Mimic Functions" [1] that could (at least in principle) change a file so that it assumes some statistical properties of a different file.
Unfortunately, it's easier said than done. One problem is that the sender doesn't know exactly which statistical tests would be used by the attacker, so while mimic functions could be devised to emulate certain statistical properties of a given file, it may be impossible to mimic all the statistical properties of any but the most trivial file -- especially if you want the result to make sense to a human reader. It might fool a machine, though.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimic_function