Elena Sevillano’s article published in the newspaper El País highlights the resurgence of Humanities degrees, which are increasingly allied with other disciplines such as, for example, Computer Science. As an example of this synergy, in the article, the author dedicates a space to talk about Iria da Cunha and her work as a computational linguist, as well as the arText project that she coordinates, pioneer in our country.
You can read the full article at this link.
Dr. José Osvaldo Ledesma, Justice of the Peace of Berón de Astrada, has been using artificial intelligence (AI), specifically the sistema arText, for a year to ensure clear writing in the drafting of his sentences. This news has been highlighted in several media: Diario Época, Misiones Online, News ES Euro, Radio Dos, Errepar + and Economis.
Iria da Cunha, coordinator of arText, has participated in a video of the Ministry of Finance and Civil Service to explain the academic and scientific work carried out at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED). In the video, he also talks about the arText system, which is currently being developed in the Departamento de Filologías Extranjeras y sus Lingüísticas of that university.
You can watch the video here:
On December 20, El País con tu futuro 2022 was held, an annual professional orientation meeting for young people organized by El País. Iria da Cunha, coordinator of arText, participated to introduce the field of computational linguistics. Among other applications of this field of artificial intelligence, she mentioned arText.
The recording of the event is available on the YouTube channel of El País. A summary of the day can be found in this article.
On December 7, an article entitled “Las inventoras españolas dicen ‘Eureka’ (y sí, en esto ganamos a Europa)” was published in Yo Dona magazine. In it, the author Mar Muñiz talks about four Spanish women inventors from different fields of knowledge. One of them is Iria da Cunha, responsible for the arText system.
In order to celebrate the International Plain Language Day (October 13), we have created a video about arText claro, our assisted writer that helps to write administrative texts in plain language. We posted it on our Twitter account (@sistema_arText) and it was a big hit! It’s only one minute long, so we encourage you to watch it to discover what arText claro is and how it can help you to write clearer and more understandable administrative texts.
On 23 July, an interview with Iria da Cunha was published in the newspaper El Progreso de Lugo. In it, she talks, among other things, about arText and arText claro.
The coordinator of the project in which arText is developed, Iria da Cunha, has been appointed full member of the Academia Joven de España (AJE). In her acceptance speech, she states that she joins the General Board of this organisation, sponsored by the Government, with the aim of representing young scientists and promoting science as a career option. Specifically, she will work to raise awareness of applied linguistics, natural language processing and plain language. It also mentions arText.
More information can be found in these media: Agencia EFE, La Vanguardia, COPE and Yahoo noticias.
As finalists in the Premios Archiletras de la Lengua in the category”Premios a la investigación”, some of the members of the arText team attended the awards ceremony held at the Casa de América in Madrid on 14 July. Finally, the prize in our category went to Elena Álvarez Mellado, a colleague from the UNED. Congratulations!
We would like to congratulate all the winners and finalists of these awards. For our team, the nomination is already a success. It was also great to meet so many friends at the gala.
The arText system is one of the three finalists for the Premios Archiletras de la Lengua in the category “Premio a la investigación”, together with Elena Álvarez Mellado and the Biblioteca Virtual de la Filología Española. In total, among all categories, the jury has selected 36 finalists out of 152 nominations, so it is an honour for us to have made it this far. The winners will be announced at an event in Madrid on July 14th.
More information on the finalists and the composition of the jury can be found in this article on the Archiletras website.
On 14 June, the Nordés Club Empresarial (A Coruña) invited us to give a talk on the applications of plain language in the business and administrative fields. The talk was entitled “Lenguaje claro: una estrategia comunicativa para crear valor en las empresas y en la Administración”. We also presented arText claro.
In addition, they interviewed the team’s coordinator, Iria da Cunha. The interview is available on their website.
The Universidad Nebrija invited Iria da Cunha to give a talk as part of the TEDxUNebrija event. The talk was entitled”¿Eres de letras o de ciencias? De las dos: soy lingüista computacional”. In the presentation, Iria introduced her academic career, explained the possibilities offered by computational linguistics, and mentioned arText claro as an example.
The journal Archiletras científica nº 6, about linguistic technologies, was presented on January 31st, 2022. The event took place at the Instituto Cervantes, in Madrid. The participants were Luis García Montero (Director of the Instituto Cervantes), Arsenio Escolar (Founder and Editor of Archiletras and Archiletras científica), Miguel Escassi (Director of Políticas Públicas y Relaciones Institucionales of Google España y Portugal), Estrella Montolío (Co-director of Archiletras científica), Mireia Farrús (Coordinator of the volume), Carme Artigas (Secretary of State for Digitalización e Inteligencia Artificial) and Pilar Alegría (Minister of Educación y Formación Profesional). More information about the event is available here.
Iria da Cunha, the coordinator of the arText team, attended the event as the author of the article “Discurso y tecnologías lingüísticas en español”, which was published in Archiletras científica nº 6.
The event was broadcast live on YouTube. You can watch the video here.
In the photo: Iria da Cunha, Mireia Farrús, Ana Freire, Carme Artigas, Estrella Montolío and Maite Martín.
The arText system has exceeded 100,000 users! Many thanks to all of them for keeping the project growing nationally and internationally. 🙂
Archiletras issue 14 includes a dossier on administrative language. In the dossier, Antonio Martín interviewed Iria da Cunha, our coordinator, about her career, her latest book, and the research projects in which arText and arText claro have been developed, among many other things.
In addition, this issue of the journal includes the manifesto “Por el derecho del ciudadano a que la Administración le comunique todo en lenguaje claro”, written by Estrella Montolío and endorsed by Archiletras. You can read it and sign the petition to support it here.
Comun-es is the first online community of Spanish language researchers. This is an initiative promoted by the Universidad de Salamanca and the University of Oxford. It can be joined by specialists in Spanish literature, Hispanic linguistics and Spanish as LE/L2. The main objectives of this platform are:
Several members of our team have joined Comun-es. The following members have created an account on the platform: Iria da Cunha, Gerardo Sierra and Sara Pistola. In addition, we have shared the research project through which arText is currently being developed: “Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación para la e-Administración: hacia la mejora de la comunicación entre Administración y ciudadanía a través del lenguaje claro” (funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Investigación y Universidades).
Over the last few days, several media have been talking about the “Protocolo de colaboración en investigación científica en materia de comunicación clara” signed by the UNED and the Ayuntamiento de Madrid. Some of them are:
Nota de prensa del Ayuntamiento de Madrid
The UNED website has published a news item about the article “Una clasificación actualizada de los géneros textuales de la Administración pública española” (Sara Pistola and Susana Viñuales), published in the 75th number of the Journal of Language and Law.
The news item talks about the objectives and main results of the research article. It also explains how these results will be used to continue developing the arText system. Thank you very much to the UNED communication team for disseminating our research! 🙂
The journalist Ángela Núñez invited us to participate in her radio program Un idioma sin fronteras to talk about arText and arText claro. Iria da Cunha, the coordinator of the arText team, was the person that attended the interview. Among other things, she talked about terminology, linguistic standardization and the main functionalities of the arText system.
The main theme of the program Un idioma sin fronteras is the Spanish language. It is broadcast weekly on Radio Exterior and Radio 5 in different time slots. It can also be heard as a podcast. Listen to the podcast about arText here.
We have created a YouTube channel where we will be uploading audiovisual content related to arText: video tutorials, participation in conferences, events, etc.
Subscribe to be updated with new videos! 
Naiara Bellio and Óscar Pandiello, from Maldita Tecnología, invited Iria da Cunha to participate in their programme “Lenguaje automatizado: cómo nos entendemos las personas con las máquinas?”, which was streamed through their Twitch channel on 10 June. Among other things, they talked about arText and how it assists in the writing of different types of texts.
You can watch it here.
You can also find more information about the programme in this news item.
Over the last few days, several media have been talking about arText claro, arText’s new tool for writing administrative texts addressed to the citizenship in plain language. Some of them are:
On Monday 24th of May, arText claro, the new tool of the arText system that helps to write texts in plain language, was presented online. Currently, it helps to write in plain language the texts that the Public Administration staff addresses to the citizenship.
The presentation began with the interventions of two representatives of the UNED, M. Ángeles Escobar and Ricardo Mairal. Afterwards, the main researcher of the project in which arText claro has been developed, Iria da Cunha, showed a demo of the tool. After that, the guests Cristina Carretero, Julio Carlos Fuentes and Sheila Queralt presented their assessments of arText claro. The event was moderated by Susana Viñuales.
The event was broadcasted live on Canal UNED and attendees from several countries were connected. The recording is currently available on Canal UNED.
Europe Direct Comunitat Valenciana, the Representación en España of the European Commission and Europe Direct Sevilla disseminated the presentation.
José Ramón Chaves, Magistrate for contentious-administrative matters at the Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Asturias, is the author of the legal blog delaJusticia.com. In one of his latest entries, entitled “Los textos de la Administración bajo la lupa lingüística”, he talks about Iria da Cunha’s book “El discurso del ámbito de la Administración. Una perspectiva lingüística” (Editorial Comares). He also talks about the arText system, about which he says:
“Además pude conocer la existencia de arText, una aplicación gratuita que edita textos en línea, y que permite elaborar escritos administrativos (p. ej. reclamación de responsabilidad, solicitud de subvención, etcétera) ofreciendo opciones de léxico y estilo, además de contenidos típicos, proponiendo fraseología apropiada al género de texto, realizando sugerencias de discurso expresivo, propuestas de dividir oraciones largas o para evitar reiteraciones de palabras, así como corrección de uso de siglas. Y dos aspectos que me llamaron particularmente la atención; en primer lugar, esa aplicación arText que simplifica y mejora la elaboración de textos administrativos por el ciudadano, propone alternativas expresivas para corregir la tendencia al aluvión de ideas y argumentos y que muchos conectamos con partículas típicas (p. ej. asimismo, por otro lado, es más, añadiremos, en otros términos, desde otra perspectiva, etcétera); y en segundo lugar, la aplicación alerta del abuso de palabras con carga subjetiva (ej. «ísimo», «evidentemente», «clarísimo», «sin duda», etcétera)”.
Thank you very much for spreading the word about the book and the arText system! 🙂
In the 169th number of the boletín Punto y Coma of the European Union, a review by Blanca Collazos (European Commission) on ” El discurso del ámbito de la Administración: una perspectiva lingüística” (Iria da Cunha, 2020, Editorial Comares) has been published (p. 41-45). The review is available here.
The blog of the journal Llengua i Dret has published a post on the book “El discurso del ámbito de la Administración: una perspectiva lingüística”, by Iria da Cunha and with a foreword by M. Teresa Cabré, in which the arText system is also mentioned. You can read it here.
The Cálamo y Cran blog has published a post about arText. It explains some questions such as what the arText system is, how to use it, who it can be useful for and the research projects that have funded it.
Many thanks to Cálamo y Cran for their help with the dissemination!
The arText system has exceeded 50,000 users! Many thanks to all of them for keeping the project growing. 🙂
On Friday 5th of February, took place the virtual presentation of the book by Iria da Cunha “El discurso del ámbito de la Administración. Una perspectiva lingüística”, with a foreword by M. Teresa Cabré and published in the Interlingua Collection of the editorial Comares.
The event was broadcasted live on Canal UNED and was attended by 1559 people, mainly from Spain, but also from 12 other countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Egypt, Belgium, the UK and the USA. The recording is currently available on Canal UNED.
In addition, the BBVA Foundation has made a news item about the book.
The arText system already has over 45,000 users. Thank you to all of them for making the project grow! 🙂
Sheila Queralt, expert in forensic linguistics and director of the SQ Laboratory, is the author of one of the blogs of Archiletras, Por la boca muere el malo. In her post entitled «Sentencias recicladas», Sheila talks about the difficulties that forensic linguists have in attributing authorship to judicial texts. In this context, she detects a new application of the arText system.
Thank you, Sheila, for spreading the word about arText and encouraging your readers to try it out! 🙂
We have launched a Twitter account about arText, @arText_system. Here we will be telling you all the news about the system and its associated research projects. In addition, we will announce all the events, congresses, conferences, etc. in which we participate.
Follow us here 
!
In the past few weeks, several media have talked about the new functionality of arText for writing the TFG. Some of them are:
The arText system already has more than 35,000 users. The project continues to grow! 🙂
We are happy to announce that the FPI predoctoral contract linked to the project “Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación para la e-Administración: hacia la mejora de la comunicación entre Administración y ciudadanía a través del lenguaje claro (TIC-eADMIN)”, funded by convocatoria 2018 de Proyectos I+D del Subprograma Estatal de Generación de Conocimiento (Ministerio de Ciencia, Investigación y Universidades; now Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación), has been awarded to the PhD student Sara Pistola, who has been incorporated to our team the September 1, 2020.
Congratulations, Sara! 🙂
The article entitled “Una herramienta TIC para la redacción del Trabajo de Fin de Grado (TFG)” has been published in the last issue of the journal ELUA: Estudios de Lingüística. Universidad de Alicante. This journal has the “Sello de calidad revistas científicas españolas de la FECYT“.
The goal of the article is to explain that a new functionality has been enabled in the arText system to help university students in the writing of the Final Degree Project (TFG), in its research work modality, for any field of knowledge.
It is possible to access this functionality from the main page of the arText system by selecting the textual genre “Trabajo de fin de grado (TFG)” within the section “Textos académicos de cualquier ámbito”.
Our team would thank you for the dissemination of this functionality, which is totally free of charge. We are sure that it will be very useful for students who must elaborate their TFG at any Spanish university and in any field of knowledge. In addition, we find it especially useful in this difficult time that we are living, in which making electronic resources available to students is more necessary than ever, in the framework of online learning.
Article reference:
da Cunha, Iria (2020). «Una herramienta TIC para la redacción del Trabajo de Fin de Grado (TFG)». ELUA: Estudios de Lingüística. Universidad de Alicante 34. 39-72.
For the implementation of this new arText functionality, the materials from the following book on the TFG and the TFM have been used, currently recommended in many Spanish universities:
da Cunha, Iria (2016). El trabajo de fin de grado y de máster: Redacción, defensa y publicación. Barcelona: Editorial UOC. ISBN 9788490643907
The arText team wants to tell you that now more than 20.000 users use the system. We are very happy and we wanted to share it with all of you. Thank you to those who have made it possible!
We are happy to announce that the definitive result of the convocatoria 2018 de Proyectos I+D del Subprograma Estatal de Generación de Conocimiento (Ministerio de Ciencia, Investigación y Universidades) has been published. Our project, “Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación para la e-Administración: hacia la mejora de la comunicación entre Administración y ciudadanía a través del lenguaje claro (TIC-eADMIN)”, has been accepted. The project has been funded and a predoctoral FPI contract linked to the project has been obtained.
The Leonardo Scholarships were created in 2014 by the Fundación BBVA to promote a key collective in Spain: researchers between 30 and 45 years old in an intermediate stage of their careers. The program held on November 14, 2018, the I Encuentro de la Red Leonardo, which brought together the scholarship recipients of the five calls at the Madrid headquarters of the BBVA Foundation. The President of BBVA and the Fundación BBVA, Francisco González, has presented the diplomas to the winners of the different thematic areas. In the following photo the director of the arText project is collecting the diploma of the area of Humanities:
In this meeting the Red Leonardo was launched, which was born as an instrument that will facilitate the exchange of ideas and contents in the physical space and in the digital domain, through the web www.redleonardo.es. This digital site will also serve to follow the trajectories of the members of the network beyond the project carried out thanks to the Leonardo Scholarship.
The creation of the Red Leonardo has appeared in various media, such as El País, El Mundo, ABC, La Vanguardia and Cadena SER, among others.
The arText system has been included in the Resources section of the Portal del Hispanismo (Instituto Cervantes).
As indicated by Google Analytics, in almost a year (since December 2016) the arText system has exceeded 5,000 users. Thanks to all of them for their support and suggestions for improvement!
Today the arText system appeared in the News Bulletin of Radios Universitarias.
Click here to listen to the program (from minute 10:34 to minute 12:40).
Today in the program “Respuestas de la Ciencia” (Answers of Science) on Radio 5 (RTVE), an information about arText has been broadcasted.
This morning a 20-minutes interview about the arText project has been emitted in Radio 3.
Today an interview about arText has been published in the Galician newspaper called Faro de Vigo. Click on the image to read the interview included in the printed version of the newspaper:
Moreover, the interview has appeared in the online version of Faro de Vigo at: http://www.farodevigo.es/sociedad/2017/03/19/guia-virtual-escritura-precisa/1644030.html
The arText system has been appeared in various online mass media:
E-News of Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Catalunya Vanguardista Journal
