# Transforming Sensitive Documents into Quantitative Data: An AI-Based Preprocessing Toolchain for Structured and Privacy-Conscious Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10582 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10582/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05794/) (2022)
- [Stanza: A Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit for Many Human Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07082/) (2020)
- [Towards General Text Embeddings with Multi-stage Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03281/) (2023)
- [Information Leakage in Embedding Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00053/) (2020)
- [Text Embeddings Reveal (Almost) As Much As Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06816/) (2023)
- [Does BERT Pretrained on Clinical Notes Reveal Sensitive Data?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07762/) (2021)
- [Sentence Embedding Leaks More Information than You Expect: Generative Embedding Inversion Attack to Recover the Whole Sentence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03010/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unstructured text from legal, medical, and administrative sources offers a rich but underutilized resource for research in public health and the social sciences. However, large-scale analysis is hampered by two key challenges: the presence of sensitive, personally identifiable information, and significant heterogeneity in structure and language. We present a modular toolchain that prepares such text data for embedding-based analysis, relying entirely on open-weight models that run on local hardware, requiring only a workstation-level GPU and supporting privacy-sensitive research. The toolchain employs large language model (LLM) prompting to standardize, summarize, and, when needed, translate texts to English for greater comparability. Anonymization is achieved via LLM-based redaction, supplemented with named entity recognition and rule-based methods to minimize the risk of disclosure. We demonstrate the toolchain on a corpus of 10,842 Swedish court decisions under the Care of Abusers Act (LVM), comprising over 56,000 pages. Each document is processed into an anonymized, standardized summary and transformed into a document-level embedding. Validation, including manual review, automated scanning, and predictive evaluation shows the toolchain effectively removes identifying information while retaining semantic content. As an illustrative application, we train a predictive model using embedding vectors derived from a small set of manually labeled summaries, demonstrating the toolchain's capacity for semi-automated content analysis at scale. By enabling structured, privacy-conscious analysis of sensitive documents, our toolchain opens new possibilities for large-scale research in domains where textual data was previously inaccessible due to privacy and heterogeneity constraints.