Abstract

Sanitization (syn. redaction) of a document involves removing sensitive information from the document, in order to reduce the document’s classification level, possibly yielding an unclassified document. A document may need to be sanitized for a variety of reasons. Government departments usually need to declassify documents before making them public, for instance, in response to Freedom of Information requests. In hospitals, medical records are sanitized to remove sensitive patent information (patient identity information, diagnoses of deadly diseases, etc.). Document sanitization is also critical to companies who need to prevent malafide or inadvertent disclosure of proprietary information while sharing data with outsourced operations. In this paper, we propose ERASE (Efficient RedAction for Securing Entities), a system for performing document sanitization automatically. 1.

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