In this paper, we introduce Profiling–UD, a new text analysis tool inspired to the principles of linguistic profiling that can support language variation research from different perspectives. It allows the extraction of more than 130 features, spanning across different levels of linguistic description. Beyond the large number of features that can be monitored, a main novelty of Profiling–UD is that it has been specifically devised to be multilingual since it is based on the Universal Dependencies framework. In the second part of the paper, we demonstrate the effectiveness of these features in a number of theoretical and applicative studies in which they were successfully used for text and author profiling.

In this paper we present PaCCSS-IT, a Parallel Corpus of Complex-Simple Sentences for ITalian.To build the resource we develop a new method for automatically acquiring a corpus of complex-simple paired sentences able to intercept structural transformations and particularly suitable for text simplification.The method requires a wide amount of texts that can be easily extracted from the web making it suitable also for less-resourced languages.We test it on the Italian language making available the biggest Italian corpus for automatic text simplification.

Recent disasters demonstrated the central role of social media during emergencies thus motivating the exploitation of such data for crisis mapping. We propose a crisis mapping system that addresses limitations of current state-of-the-art approaches by analyzing the textual content of disaster reports from a twofold perspective. A damage detection component employs a SVM classifier to detect mentions of damage among emergency reports. A novel geoparsing technique is proposed and used to perform message geolocation. We report on a case study to show how the information extracted through damage detection and message geolocation can be combined to produce accurate crisis maps. Our crisis maps clearly detect both highly and lightly damaged areas, thus opening up the possibility to prioritize rescue efforts where they are most needed.