An Anonymization Tool for Open Data Publication of Legal Documents

Abstract

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires anonymization of documents containing personal data, such as court decisions, for public use. Doing this manually is costly and time-consuming but can be automated by applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods. This paper introduces the ANOPPI tool developed for (semi-)automatic anonymization of Finnish texts. The tool can be used both as a web application and programmatically through a REST API. Evaluation shows that ANOPPI performs well with different types of documents, however, further improving the performance of the named entity recognition and disambiguation methods would enhance the usefulness of the software. The tool is being published as open source for public use by the Ministry of Justice in Finland. A use case of ANOPPI is to publish court decisions on the Web in the LawSampo semantic portal for human close reading and as Linked Open Data for data analysis in legal informatics.