PRAT - a Tool for Assessing Risk in Written Communication

In this paper, we present a tool for assessing the risk of targeted violence in written communication: the profile risk assessment tool (PRAT). The tool reads a text and extracts a profile based on a set of assessment factors including, for example, personality, emotionality, identification, fixation, and leakage. These factors have all been shown to have relevance in risk assessment by previous research. In PRAT, each assessment factor is broken down into a set of indicators to enable creating a profile for subsequent threat. To our knowledge, PRAT is the first threat assessment tool for digital communication.