You need to be more specific about these “general characteristics."
In NLP, “general characteristics” of a sentence can mean a million different things - an analysis of moods (that is, the speaker’s attitude), the bulk of speech tags, the use of a personal pronoun, does the sentence contain active or passive verbs, what tension and voice of the verbs ...
I do not mind if you vaguely describe it, but if we do not know what you are asking for, this is unlikely, we can be specific in helping you.
My general suggestion, especially for NLP, is that you should get the tool that works best for you, and not limit yourself to a specific language. Limiting yourself to a specific language is great for some tasks where common tools are implemented everywhere, but NLP is not one of them.
Another problem with Twitter is that there are many offers that will be half-baked or compressed in strange and wonderful ways - which is why most NLP tools are not trained. To help out there, NUS SMS Corpus consists of "about 10,000 SMS messages collected by students." Due to such limitations and uses, an analysis that may be useful in your research using Twitter.
If you are more specific, I will try to list some tools that will help.
Smerity Jun 16 '09 at 3:35 2009-06-16 03:35
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