Patent ID: 8924852

Claim:
A support apparatus for supporting a processing of a character string in a document, said support apparatus comprising: a document storage device which stores a plurality of shared documents; a designation reception unit which receives a designation from a user; a document acquisition unit which acquires one of said documents from said document storage device based on said designation of said user; a historical-information storage device which stores pieces of historical information on past processings of character strings in said documents in said document storage device; a risky-word list, stored in said document storage device, listing a plurality of risky words common to said documents; a reference-information generator which reads said historical information pieces related to said acquired document from said historical-information storage device, and thereby generates reference information for helping said user to select a processing of a character string in said acquired document, said processing of said character string including: a masking or unmasking of said character, said masking including: identifying, in said acquired document, at least one risky word in said risky word list, and upon identifying, automatically referring to an electronic dictionary, and replacing said identified at least one risky word with another term found in said referred electronic dictionary; a presentation unit which presents, to said user, a designation reception screen for receiving a designation of said replacing of said character string with said another term, together with said reference information; a score calculator, included in the reference-information generator, which obtains a frequency of how often each of said character strings in said documents has been used in an unmasked or masked state before by using said read historical information pieces, and then calculates a score representing a risky word measurement of each character string; and wherein said score is calculated based on: a number of times that said character string is unmasked or masked at a same position in said acquired document; a number of times that said character string is unmasked or masked in a different document; and a number of times that represents how many times said character string is unmasked or masked at a different position in said acquired document.