Reversible Pseudonymisation of Documents Sent to External LLMs: an Open Bilingual Benchmark and an Engine

Overview & Synopsis

Professionals send working documents to external large language models. A common safeguard is reversible pseudonymisation: personal data are replaced with placeholders before the request and restored locally in the answer. We present an open benchmark of five existing open tools and a regular-expression baseline on Russian and UK English, and an open engine built on the two strongest tools. The benchmark excludes each tool's own authors' dataset from its verdict, compares the engine with each tool on identical datasets for detection, reports masking precision, and tests on a held-out set of synthetic documents whose files, hashes, decision rules, run plan and stopping rule were published before any run. Two local LLMs test whether placeholders survive. All evaluation data are synthetic, and the benchmark was run by the author of the engine; code, data, predictions and raw answers are released. On external datasets no existing tool meets all predefined thresholds: in UK English the identifier and leak thresholds are not met, in Russian the identifier threshold is borderline. On the last held-out set of 1,000 documents per language, the best existing tools leave a whole value visible in 61% (Russian) and 58% (UK) of documents. On these documents, from the generator it was developed on, the engine does so in 0.3% [0.1; 0.9] and 0.2% [0.1; 0.7], leaves any part of a value visible in 0.8% and 0.2%, and meets all detection thresholds in both languages. In UK English it also restores at least 99% of its placeholders after 760 answers. In Russian it restores only 94.6% [93.6; 95.6] of name placeholders, against a 99% threshold, mainly because the inflection it borrows from pii-guard produces wrong surname forms. The engine was developed over six earlier held-out sets from the same generator; real documents were not tested.