A new PJ anonymization tool for Italian legal documents

As part of the Predictive Justice project, a new anonymization tool for Italian legal documents was presented by Daniele Licari at the 16th International Conference on Statistical Analysis of Textual Data – held in Naples on July 6-8, 2022 (JADT2022).

The new tool facilitates the dissemination of judicial decisions -- which is a valuable aid to decisions for judges and jurists, and holds the promise to increase public trust in the judicial system. It allows people to personally verify their rights and the principle of equality. It also promotes data sharing and advanced analytics.

"In our work, we have argued and demonstrated that the current manual approach to anonymization used by the Italian Justice System is inadequate both to preserve privacy and to handle the enormous amount of legal data", says Daniele, who is the Chief Data Engineer at EMbeDS.

At the JADT2022 conference, Daniele presented the first solution aimed at automatic anonymization of the Italian National Legal Archive (Archivio Giuridico Nazionale). Remarkably, the proposed tool achieves very high performance in identifying entities to be anonymized (>99% for Person and ID Code entities) and supports several anonymization methods that can be applied to the text depending on the purpose of the anonymization.

This work, carried out in collaboration with the Trial Court of Genoa, can result in significant manual labor savings and minimize the time required to create a privacy-compliant (GDPR-compliant) legal data publication system.