Marco Forlano
2026
Towards Inclusive Communication in Cancer Prevention and Treatment: A Case Study on Italian Informational Materials
Chiara Cassani | Luca Brigada Villa | Marco Forlano | Serena Coschignano | Amelia Barcellini | Silvia Luraghi | Alberto Giovanni Leone | Chiara Zanchi | Adalberto Lovotti
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Linguistic Analysis for Health (HeaLing 2026)
Chiara Cassani | Luca Brigada Villa | Marco Forlano | Serena Coschignano | Amelia Barcellini | Silvia Luraghi | Alberto Giovanni Leone | Chiara Zanchi | Adalberto Lovotti
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Linguistic Analysis for Health (HeaLing 2026)
This paper presents an annotation scheme developed to analyze linguisticaccessibility and inclusivity in Italian cancer-related informational materials.The scheme combines metadata annotation, qualitative analysis of textual andvisual features, and automatically extracted measures of linguistic complexitycapturing structural, lexical, and probabilistic properties of the texts. Abrief case study demonstrates how the proposed framework can be applied tocompare documents and identify different sources of linguistic difficulty. Theapproach provides a replicable methodological basis for large-scale analyses ofhealth communication materials.
2024
Towards the WhAP Corpus: A Resource for the Study of Italian on WhatsApp
Ilaria Fiorentini | Marco Forlano | Nicholas Nese
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Ilaria Fiorentini | Marco Forlano | Nicholas Nese
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Over the past two decades, the rise of new technologies and social networks has significantly shaped written language, imbuing it with characteristics akin to the spoken language. This study reports on the ongoing initiative to build the WhAP corpus, a resource featuring WhatsApp conversations in Italian, encompassing both written and spoken messages and totaling at present more than 400.000 tokens, 89 conversations, and 194 participants from diverse age groups and geographical regions of Italy. More specifically, this paper focuses on the practical steps involved in the construction of the resource. Once publicly accessible, the WhAP Corpus will enable in-depth linguistic research on the language used on WhatsApp, which shows unique features such as the blending of written and spoken elements.