Profiling-UD: a Tool for Linguistic Profiling of Texts

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.