Fine-tuned version of xlm-roberta-base for PII (Personally Identifiable Information) detection with focus on financial and contact data.
Developed by Yalen AI as part of the Yalen Sentinel Pulse privacy protection platform.
Model Description
This model performs Named Entity Recognition (NER) to detect sensitive personal and financial information in text. It uses BIO tagging (Begin / Inside / Outside) and supports multilingual input, with strong performance on French, English, and Tunisian Arabic-Latin mixed text.
Privacy compliance (GDPR, Tunisian Data Protection Law)
Document redaction — anonymize sensitive documents before sharing
Data loss prevention (DLP) — detect accidental PII leaks in logs or messages
Financial document processing — extract IBAN/card numbers for validation
Healthcare & insurance — detect dates and contact information
Limitations
Maximum input length: 512 tokens (long documents should be split by sentence or paragraph)
Trained primarily on French and English data — performance may vary on other languages
Card number detection works best with standard spacing formats (XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX)
Trailing punctuation may be included in token spans — apply post-processing (.strip(".,;"))
Training Data
The model was fine-tuned on a dataset composed of:
Source
Type
Volume
Languages
Synthetically generated PII
IBAN, CARD, PHONE, EMAIL, DATE
~50,000 examples
FR, EN, AR-latin
Filtered CommonCrawl corpus
Neutral text contexts
~20,000 examples
Multilingual
Anonymized internal Yalen data
Tunisian/French formats
~5,000 examples
FR, AR-latin
No real patient data was used in training.
All personally identifiable information in training data is either synthetic or fully anonymized prior to use.
Intended Use
Primary Use Case
Validation of PII detections in the Yalen Artemesia Desktop Guardian compliance audit tool. The model acts as a second-pass validator after regex-based detection, providing confidence scores to reduce false positives.
Inference Pipeline
Raw text (file content)
↓
Regex patterns (email, IBAN, CARD, PHONE, DATE) → raw findings
↓
XLM-RoBERTa (this model)
- context window: ±100 chars around each detected value
- BIO token classification
- confidence score per entity
↓
Threshold: 0.55
≥ 0.55 → slm_confirmed=True → included in audit report
< 0.55 → slm_confirmed=False → flagged as uncertain (not silently dropped)
Out-of-Scope Uses
Real-time surveillance or profiling of individuals
Automated decisions affecting individuals' rights
Use outside of compliance audit contexts
Bias, Risks, and Limitations
Known Biases
Bias
Risk
Mitigation
Linguistic bias
Lower performance on non-latin Arabic scripts
Documented limitation; AR-latin covered in training data
IBAN format bias
Stronger on FR/TN formats
Synthetic data covers 30+ country formats
Threshold sensitivity
Score 0.40–0.55 edge cases
Uncertain findings preserved in report with flag, not silently dropped
Training data distribution
Overrepresentation of FR/TN data
Stated limitation; multilingual XLM-R base partially compensates
Risk Mitigation
Graceful degradation: if the model is unavailable, the system falls back to regex-only detection with slm_score=1.0 — no silent failures
Human in the loop: the tool produces a consultative audit report; no automated decision affecting individuals is made
Transparency: every finding in the generated PDF report includes the slm_score and slm_confirmed fields
What the model does NOT do
It does not detect names of persons (handled by spaCy NER on filenames)
It does not make decisions — it produces scores for human review
It does not process or store the scanned content beyond the inference session
Explainability
Each detected entity contributes a traceable output:
python
1{2"type":"EMAIL",3"value":"j***.d*****@h******.fr",# masked in report4"slm_score":0.923,5"slm_confirmed":True6}
The confidence score is derived from the model's softmax output on the token span overlapping the regex-detected value. Scores below 0.55 are surfaced in the report as uncertain rather than hidden.
GDPR / HDS Compliance Notes
Local inference only: no data is sent to external APIs or servers
No persistent storage of scanned content: only metadata (file paths, PII types, scores) are stored
Purpose limitation: the model is used exclusively for compliance auditing
Yalen Sentinel Pulse is an AI-powered platform for PII detection and data privacy protection, developed by the Yalen AI team. It combines regex patterns, ML models, and NER to provide comprehensive sensitive data identification.