How to Remove Names using SpaCy

by vigneshchennai74 Updated: Jan 31, 2023

Popular Python package Spacy is used for natural language processing. Removing named entities from a text, such as people's names, is one of the things you can perform with Spacy. This can be done using the ents property of a Spacy document, which returns a list of named entities that have been identified in the text. 

Removing names using Spacy can have several applications, including: 

Anonymizing text data: Removing names from text data can be useful for protecting the privacy of individuals mentioned in the data. 
Text summarization: Removing named entities, such as names of people, organizations, and locations, can help to reduce the amount of irrelevant information in a text and improve the overall readability of the summary. 
Text classification: Removing named entities can help to improve the performance of text classification models by reducing the amount of noise in the text and making it easier for the model to identify the relevant features. 
Sentiment Analysis: Removing names can help to improve the accuracy of sentiment analysis by reducing the amount of personal bias and opinion present in the text.

Here is how you can remove names using Spacy: 

Preview of the output that you will get on running this code from your IDE

Code

In this solution we used spacy library of python.

using Spacy to remove names from a data frame in Python 3.9

PythonLines of Code : 24License : CC BY-SA 4.0

Dependent Libraries :

import spacy
import pandas as pd

# Test dataframe
df = pd.DataFrame({'ID':['A123','X907'], 'Comment':['I am five years old, and my name is John', 'Today I met with Dr. Jacob']})

# Initialize the model
nlp = spacy.load('en_core_web_trf')

def remove_names(text):
    doc = nlp(text)
    newString = text
    for e in reversed(doc.ents):
        if e.label_ == "PERSON": # Only if the entity is a PERSON
            newString = newString[:e.start_char] + newString[e.start_char + len(e.text):]
    return newString

df['Comment'] = df['Comment'].apply(remove_names)
print(df.to_string())

     ID                               Comment
0  A123  I am five years old, and my name is
1  X907                 Today I met with Dr.

Copy the code using the "Copy" button above, and paste it in a Python file in your IDE.
Enter the Text
Run the file to annihilate Names in the text

I hope you found this useful. I have added the link to dependent libraries, version information in the following sections.

I found this code snippet by searching for "Using Spacy to remove names from a data frame "in kandi. You can try any such use case.

Note

In this snippet we are using a Language Model (en_core_wb_trf)

Download the model using the command python-m spacy download en_core_web_trf.
Paste it in your terminal and download it

Environment Tested

I tested this solution in the following versions. Be mindful of changes when working with other versions.

The solution is created in Python 3.7.15 Version
The solution is tested on Spacy 3.4.3 Version
the solution is tested on Pandas 1.3.5 Version

Using this solution, we can remove Names in text with the help of function in spacy . This process also facilities an easy to use, hassle free method to create a hands-on working version of code which would help us remove names in the text in python.

Dependent Library

spaCyby explosion

Python 25129 Version:3.4.4

License: Permissive (MIT)

💫 Industrial-strength Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Python

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spaCyby explosion

Python 25129 Version:3.4.4 License: Permissive (MIT)

💫 Industrial-strength Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Python

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pandasby pandas-dev

Python 36769 Version:1.5.2

License: Permissive (BSD-3-Clause)

Flexible and powerful data analysis / manipulation library for Python, providing labeled data structures similar to R data.frame objects, statistical functions, and much more

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pandasby pandas-dev

Python 36769 Version:1.5.2 License: Permissive (BSD-3-Clause)

Flexible and powerful data analysis / manipulation library for Python, providing labeled data structures similar to R data.frame objects, statistical functions, and much more

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If you do not have SpaCy and pandas that is required to run this code, you can install it by clicking on the above link and copying the pip Install command from the Spacy page in kandi.

You can search for any dependent library on kandi like Spacy and pandas