As a joint initiative with Tommaso Caselli (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), we set up a collaboration with the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research (MIUR) on the automatic analysis of linguistic data contained in the answers given by the participants of the public consultation “La Buona Scuola” (#labuonascuola).

More specifically we analyzed the data using a pipeline of Natural Language Processing tools such as a lemmatizer, a part-of-speech tagger, a key-concept extractor, and a topic modeler. Part of these tools have been implemented in FBK (i.e. TextPro) while for topic modelling we adopted Mallet. On the top of the automatic processing we designed and developed a graphical interface called PIERINO, an acronym that stands for PIattaforma per l’Estrazione ed il Recupero di INformazioni Online (Platform for the Extraction and Retrieval of Online Information).

PIERINO provides a set of intuitive visualizations to browse and search the data in an online environment.