pii-xlmr-bilingual — EN/KO PII detection and redaction

A fine-tuned xlm-roberta-base span tagger that finds and redacts personal data in English, Korean, and code-switched text, for seven entity types: PER, RRN (주민등록번호), PHONE, EMAIL, ADDRESS, CARD, ORG.

Runs on CPU at ~15.6 ms/sentence and makes no network calls at inference — both enforced in code and verified. Trains in ~28 minutes on one consumer GPU (measured on Apple M3 Pro / MPS).

Full training pipeline, evaluation harness, data card and design rationale: https://github.com/noczero/security-and-swe-agent-harness

Results

Exact-span F1 — a hit counts only if both the entity type and the exact character boundaries match. This is the strict rule; overlap-based scoring reads much higher and is reported separately in the repo.

dev is listed only so nobody can quote it as model quality. The headline number is 0.9711.

Separately for English and Korean

Support (gold spans) in brackets. Korean is the harder language — it carries most of the held-out spans and essentially all the residual error on synthetic text, because a Korean span must stop before an attached particle (김민수 inside 김민수는).

Against an off-the-shelf baseline

fastino/gliner2-privacy-filter-PII-multi, zero-shot, same sentences and same scorer:

Read the relaxed columns first — they are the honest control. Most of the advantage is boundaries, not detection: on switched both models find essentially the same entities, and the strict gap comes from cutting them in the right place. Word-level span representations cannot express the gold Korean span at all.

Usage

from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForTokenClassification

tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("noczero/pii-xlmr-bilingual")
model = AutoModelForTokenClassification.from_pretrained("noczero/pii-xlmr-bilingual")

Use the repo's inference path rather than a naive decode. Correct spans depend on two things this model was built around:

• NFC normalisation, never NFKC. NFKC turns ㈜한국 from 3 characters into 5 and shifts every later offset.
• Hangul pre-splitting to one tagging unit per syllable, which raises the exact-span ceiling from 97.1% to 100%. Labels ride on units; offsets are never read from the tokenizer — trusting return_offsets_mapping here scored a correct model 0/6 in testing.

The repo ships this as one command:

python scripts/redact.py --weights <path-to-this-model> \
    --text "김철수는 010-2345-6789 로 연락 주세요"

김철수는 010-2345-6789 로 연락 주세요
  -> [PER]는 [PHONE] 로 연락 주세요
     [  0:3  ] PER      김철수
     [  5:18 ] PHONE    010-2345-6789

Output is the NFC-normalised text, zero or more non-overlapping spans with exact [start, end) offsets, and a redacted copy. No confidence scores — the operating point is plain argmax.

Training data

Synthesised, not scraped. Public Korean PII corpora with the entity types this task needs do not exist at usable licence terms, so the training set is generated: 33,953 examples / 41,806 gold spans, built from partitioned entity pools and sentence frames, plus real PER/ORG rows from KLUE-NER and Few-NERD (both CC-BY-SA-4.0).

Two design choices carry most of the quality:

• Type-agnostic frames. The same sentence frames are shared verbatim across RRN, PHONE and CARD, so only a value's structure can assign its label — not a nearby cue word. The first model had learned "the number after 주민등록번호" and mislabelled 40 of 61 held-out RRNs as PHONE.
• Confusable negatives. Sentences with digits and no PII, deliberately RRN-shaped (order numbers). Nothing card-shaped — a Luhn-valid negative would teach the model to miss real cards. This, not frame widening, is what fixed RRN to 1.000 precision at 1.000 recall.

Full data card (composition, EN/KO balance, synthesis method, licences, failure modes): DATA_CARD.md.

Limitations — read before deploying

1. Real prose is much weaker than synthetic. real is 0.7356, and ORG is the weakest thing in the model (P 0.621 / R 0.667). The strong numbers describe our generator's held-out sets; they are not a promise about arbitrary text.
2. real is quarantined by row, not by entity. A news corpus repeats the same people, so it shares 315 entity surfaces with training rows — it measures unseen sentences about partly-seen entities.
3. real covers only PER and ORG. The other five types have no real-text measurement at all.
4. test is not calibrated to be as hard as gen and reads slightly higher for that reason.
5. Trailing digits are noise. Training on MPS is not bitwise reproducible (max parameter delta 9.96e-05 over 12 steps; a CPU control reproduces at 0.0). Inference is exactly reproducible.
6. Recall-oriented balance. For redaction a missed entity is a leak and a false positive is cosmetic, but the shipped operating point is plain argmax rather than a tuned threshold — see the design doc's precision/recall discussion.
7. Not a compliance control. This is a detection aid; it should not be the only thing standing between raw text and a disclosure.

Licence and citation

MIT, following the xlm-roberta-base base model. Training corpora (KLUE-NER, Few-NERD) are CC-BY-SA-4.0 and are cited in the data card.