Patent ID: 7184947

Claim:
An anonymity setting device comprising: a specificity calculating unit extracting an expression specifying a person from an input document and calculating a specificity to evaluate a degree of intensity at which the expression can specify the person; and an anonymity setting processing unit changing a name of the person in the input document having a specificity which is greater than a predetermined threshold; wherein said specificity calculating unit extracts surrounding expressions of the person's name from said input document, and calculates, for each surrounding expression, a degree of specificity for evaluating a degree of specificity at which the person can be specified with the extracted individual surrounding expressions; and said anonymity setting processing unit sets, when there is a surrounding expression of a degree of specificity higher than a predetermined threshold, anonymity for such surrounding expression and the person's name; and wherein the specificity calculating unit further includes: a syntax analyzing means creating a syntax tree indicative of a modification relationship between clauses based on a syntax analyzing rule from a result of a part-of-speech analysis; a person specifying tree extracting means extracting a tree structure specifying the person as a person modification expression based on a person specifying tree extracting rule for the tree structure obtained by the parsing unit; and a tree structure specificity calculating means calculating a specificity of the person specifying tree thus extracted based on statistical information.