Automated PII Redaction

7 December 2022

Imprima Smart Redaction achieves accuracy (recall) of around 95%

Sellers, or their advisors, are often confronted with the requirement to redact Personally Identifiable Information – an error-prone and laborious task. Outsourcing is expensive and may cause delays before your deal can go live. And why spend money on it, when it can be done automatically, in your own VDR?

Your concern may be its reliability? Well, no need to be concerned. We have shown that it is very reliable. In fact, Imprima’s technology will find in most cases at least 90% of the terms to be redacted. Not enough? Well, consider this: a 2011 scientific study by Grossmann and Cormack showed that manual reviews often deliver low reliability, ranging between 50% and 85% (“Recall”). We see that phenomena in our VDRs too. When we test our technology on documents that have already been manually redacted, we see that it finds a lot of items (names, addresses etc.) that humans missed.

Test results of Imprima Automatic Redaction on a combination of English, German, Italian and Dutch documents, randomly picked from Imprima VDRs, where the objective was to automatically redact: person name, address etc., see table. Imprima’s machine-learning algorithm (a native tool in the Imprima VDR) was applied. As can be seen from the results in the table, a very high recall is achieved for all entities, in all languages, where overall recall is higher than 90% for all items redacted. So, what does this mean? Recall is a measure of reliability, in particular how many of the items to be redacted are actually found. Not shown in the table, but this was also achieved with very high precision (a measure for how few words were redacted that did not need to be redacted): only a very tiny fraction of all words in the document were “over redacted”. If you would like more information on this experiment, please contact Imprima.

As 90% recall is significantly more accurate than human redaction, you are already starting off from a stronger position. If you want even higher accuracy, you also have the option to use Smart Redaction as a Technology Assisted Review tool, combining the best technology with human expertise. Smart Redaction comes with a very intuitive and flexible user interface that allows you to easily and efficiently conduct a manual review of the AI redactions. As most of the work is already done for you (90% or more), you only need to confirm what is automatically generated and add what was missed. This will save you enormous amounts of time. Moreover, when following this methodology, users may decide – after reviewing a few documents this way – that there is no need to review everything, saving even more time.

In short, Imprima’s machine-learning driven Smart Redaction actually works.

Find out more about Automated Document Redaction Software.

Interested? Contact Imp rima to get a free trial.