An Assistant Tool for Concealing Personal Information in Text

This paper describes an assistant tool for concealing personal information in text. This is an important procedure for protecting privacy when public documents are disclosed, preventing accidental leaks of personal information, and other purposes. However, finding personal information in text is very time-consuming and laborintensive. To make it easier to conceal personal information, we have developed a graphical user interface (GUI) tool that extracts candidate personal information in text, indicates candidate personal information using different colors according to its class, and creates rules for extracting personal information from text, including annotations of personal information. In one experiment, our GUI tool enabled users to conceal personal names in Japanese text about three times faster than when the task was done without candidate personal information.