Identification and Anonymization of Named Entities in Unstructured Information Sources for Use in Social Engineering Detection

The extraction of critical information from crime-related documents is a crucial task for law enforcement agencies. The extraction of this information can be interpreted as a Named-Entity Recognition (NER) task. However, there is a considerable lack of adequately annotated data on general real-world crime scenarios. To address this issue, we present CrimeNER, a case study of crime-related NER, and a general crime-related Named-Entity Recognition database (CrimeNER-db), consisting of more than 1.5K annotated documents extracted from public reports of terrorist attacks and the US Department of Justice's press notes. We define 4 coarse types of crime entity and 21 fine-grained entity types. We address the quality of the presented database with fully supervised experiments using flat and nested NER architectures and zero- and few-shot experiments using Large Language Models (LLMs). The database is available on GitHub.

We target practical anonymization of Persian customer chats by training a compact NER model from LLM-labeled supervision and selecting the best labeler for deployment. We compare three instruction-tuned LLMs: DeepSeek-V3-0324, GPT-OSS-120B, and Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507, to produce span annotations under a shared JSON protocol, yielding four corpora (OSS_ZeroShot, Qwen_ZeroShot, Qwen_FewShot, DeepSeek_FewShot). A MatinaRoberta-based token-classifier is trained per corpus and evaluated with token-level Precision/Recall/F1 (overall and per-class). We also report Label Coverage Recall (LCR), the proportion of gold non-O tokens predicted as non-O, and quantify cross-labeler behavior via a token-level Venn on test annotations. Finally, we contrast test-set annotation latency of the LLMs on H200 nodes with the trained NER's test-time labeling on a single RTX 3090. Results show that supervision from OSS_ZeroShot yields the strongest macro-F1 and LCR, while the resulting NER labels an entire 40K-message test set in approximately 2 minutes on one consumer GPU. This establishes a practical path to high-quality, low-cost anonymization for Persian industrial data.

We present CrimeNER Demo, an AI-powered platform that enables us to extract general crime-related information from documents and classify them into entity types with two levels of granularity. We provide pretrained NER models on the CrimeNER database, and we give the possibility to users to provide their own annotated data to train models for their own specific cases. This demonstrator aims to promote crime-related NER research and provides a practical tool to automatically extract crime information for researchers and law enforcement agencies. The demonstrator includes: i) Pretrained NER models on the crime domain; ii) Possibility to finetune the models on specific data annotated by the user; and iii) An automatic pipeline to extract and annotate crime entities from documents. The demo platform, a tutorial to run the demo, and a video demonstration are publicly available on GitHub.