Person's Names (NER)

Filter

This filter identifies Person's names based on natural language processing (NLP) and named-entity recognition (NER) in text.

Required Parameters

This filter requires the connection properties for the ph-eye service in a phEyeConfiguration object:

Parameter	Description	Default Value
endpoint	The ph-eye service endpoint.	http://localhost:18080
timeout	The ph-eye service connection timeout in seconds.	600
labels	A comma-separated list of labels supported by the ph-eye service. The default ph-eye-pii-en-* models are trained on the name label; both name and Person are recognized as person names.	name

Optional Parameters

Parameter	Description	Default Value
removePunctuation	When set to true, punctuation will be removed prior to analysis.	false
phEyeFilterStrategies	A list of filter strategies.	None
bearerToken	A bearer token for the Ph-Eye service.	None
modelPath	Path to a local GLiNER model directory for on-device inference. When set, detection runs locally instead of calling the remote endpoint. See Local inference below.	None
enabled	When set to false, the filter will be disabled and not applied	true
ignored	A list of terms to be ignored by the filter.	None
windowSize	Sets the size of the window (in terms) surrounding a span to look for contextual terms. If set, this value overrides the value of span.window.size in the configuration.	The value of span.window.size which is by default 5.
priority	The priority (integer) of this filter. Valid values are any positive integer, where a higher value indicates a higher priority. Priority is used for tie-breaking when two spans may be otherwise identical.	0

Filter Strategies

The filter may have zero or more filter strategies. When no filter strategy is given the default strategy of REDACT is used. When multiple filter strategies are given the filter strategies will be applied in as they are listed. See Filter Strategies for details.

Strategy	Description
REDACT	Replace the sensitive text with a placeholder.
MASK	Replace each character of the sensitive text with a mask character (* by default).
TRUNCATE	Replace all but a few characters of the sensitive text with a truncation character (* by default).
ABBREVIATE	Replace a person's name with its initials (for example, George Washington becomes GW).
RANDOM_REPLACE	Replace the sensitive text with a similar, random value.
STATIC_REPLACE	Replace the sensitive text with a given value.
CRYPTO_REPLACE	Replace the sensitive text with its encrypted value.
HASH_SHA256_REPLACE	Replace the sensitive text with its SHA256 hash value.
FPE_ENCRYPT_REPLACE	Replace the sensitive text with a value generated by format-preserving encryption (FPE)

Conditions

Each filter strategy may have one condition. See Conditions for details.

Conditional	Description	Operators
TOKEN	Compares the value of the sensitive text.	== , !=
CONTEXT	Compares the filtering context.	== , !=
CONFIDENCE	Compares the confidence in the sensitive text against a threshold value.	< , <=, > , >=, ==, !=

Example Policy

{
   "identifiers": {
      "pheyes": [
        {
          "phEyeConfiguration": {
              "endpoint": "http://localhost:18080"
          },
          "phEyeFilterStrategies": [
             {
                "strategy": "REDACT",
                "redactionFormat": "{{{REDACTED-%t}}}"
             }
          ]
        }
      ]
   }
}

Local inference

By default the filter calls a remote Ph-Eye service over HTTP at its endpoint. It can instead run a GLiNER model on-device by setting modelPath on the phEyeConfiguration to a local model directory (the ONNX model, the tokenizer, and gliner_config.json). When modelPath is set, detection runs locally and the endpoint is not used.

Local inference is provided by the optional phileas-pheye-onnx module (ONNX Runtime), which is not a dependency of core Phileas. Add it to your build to enable local inference. If modelPath is set but that module is not on the classpath, Phileas fails fast while the policy's filters are built (for example when you call prepare(policy), or on the first filter() call for the policy), rather than silently falling back to the remote service or failing part-way through a document. The failure is a MissingPhEyeProviderException with a logged error naming the missing phileas-pheye-onnx dependency, so loading the policy up front surfaces the problem before any text is processed.

{
   "identifiers": {
      "pheyes": [
        {
          "phEyeConfiguration": {
              "modelPath": "/models/ph-eye-pii-en-small"
          },
          "phEyeFilterStrategies": [
             {
                "strategy": "REDACT",
                "redactionFormat": "{{{REDACTED-%t}}}"
             }
          ]
        }
      ]
   }
}