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 2 and 16 we gave a workshop on “La redacción del TFG en el contexto de la comunicación especializada” for the students of the Degree in Catalan Studies at the Universidad de Valencia. During the workshop, we showed the attendees the possibilities offered by the arText system for writing the TFG.
Many thanks to Josep E. Ribera, coordinator of the degree, for the invitation!
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.
On December 1st we gave a workshop at UIC Barcelona on “Cómo hacer un trabajo científico” as part of the “Student Academic Conference 2023: Caring for the Future”. In it, we were able to show students how to use arText to write their papers.
Thank you very much, Mònica Argemí, for the invitation!
Recently, the Ministry of Universities has granted Laia Vidal, professor at the Facultad de Traducción y Ciencias del Lenguaje of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and researcher of the IULATERM group, a Margarita Salas postdoctoral grant. On January 1st she will join the Departamento de Filologías Extranjeras y sus Lingüísticas of UNED to work on the development of new functionalities of arText for 2 years.
Congratulations, Laia! We are glad that you are part of our team.
Jia Chen is carrying out her doctoral thesis in the framework of the arText project thanks to the PhD program in Education of the Facultad de Formación de Profesorado y Educación of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM). The topic of her thesis is: “Teaching Chinese university students to write administrative texts in Spanish with the help of arText”. The directors are: Juan Antonio Núñez, coordinator of the Centro de Escritura at UAM, and Iria da Cunha, head of the arText project.
Currently, three doctoral theses related to arText are in progress.
The Grado en Lingüística y Lenguas Aplicadas of the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras at the Universidad de Cádiz invited us to give the workshop “Asesoría lingüística, lenguaje claro y salidas laborales” on November 23rd. Among other issues, we showed the possibilities offered by arText claro for writing administrative texts addressed to citizens in plain language.
Here in the picture with the colleages from the Instituto de Lingüística Aplicada de la Universidad de Cádiz who attended the conference.
On November 22, we gave a workshop at the Instituto de Lingüística Aplicada (ILA) of the University of Cadiz called “Herramientas automáticas para la revisión lingüística y la redacción en lenguaje claro”. Among other information, we showed the attendees the possibilities offered by arText claro for revising and writing administrative texts in plain language.
On November 21, the first session of the workshop “La escritura del TFG y del TFM en Educación” was held at the Centro de Escritura of the Facultad de Formación de Profesorado y Educación of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM). Juan Antonio Núñez, coordinator of the Centro de Escritura of the UAM, invited us to give the inaugural session of the workshop, which talked about “Estructura y contenidos prototípicos de un TFG y un TFM”. Among other issues, the students were shown the arText functionality that helps to structure and write the Trabajo de Fin de Grado.
Last year, the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) and the Madrid City Council signed the “Protocolo de colaboración en investigación científica en materia de comunicación clara”. The motivation of this document was that the Madrid City Council, through the Subdirección General de Calidad y Evaluación, would collaborate in the TIC-eADMIN research project. Now, an addendum has been signed to extend this collaboration until April 2024 with the aim of continuing to work together in the development and implementation of the new functionalities of arText claro.
In the picture, members of the UNED and the Madrid City Council at the signing ceremony of the collaboration agreement, which took place in October 2021.
On October 26 and 27, the course “La carrera investigadora: de los inicios a la consolidación” was held in Madrid. As part of this event, Iria da Cunha gave the talk “Cómo ser IP en Humanidades: algunos apuntes”. In it, she talked about her role as the principal investigator of the funded projects in which arText has been developed so far.
The course can be viewed in its entirety on the YouTube channel of the Academia Joven de España, one of the organizers of the event. Iria da Cunha’s presentation can also be seen here:
On October 26, 2022, the provisional resolution of the 2022 call for grants for “Prueba de concepto” projects in the framework of the state program to promote scientific-technical research and its transfer (Ministry of Science and Innovation) was published. Our project “Un prototipo tecnológico para la redacción en lenguaje claro: incorporación en la Administración pública y análisis de su impacto en la ciudadanía” (arText_IMPACT) has been accepted and has obtained funding. We are very happy!
The Jornadas 50 Aniversario “Comunicación Intercultural, Mediación e Interacción en línea”, organized by the Departamento de Filologías Extranjeras y sus Lingüísticas of the Facultad de Filología of the UNED, took place on October 18th. It is in this department where the research on arText is currently being carried out.
The director of the department, M. Dolores Castrillo, gave us the opportunity to present the talk entitled: “ArText claro como herramienta de mediación en la comunicación entre la Administración y la ciudadanía”. The conference can be seen on Canal UNED. Specifically, the communication about arText claro can be seen here.
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 October 13, in commemoration of International Plain Language Day, the training area of the Poder Judicial de la Provincia de Corrientes (Argentina) organized a conference at the Ateneo de Lenguaje Claro aimed at officers, magistrates and lawyers, and other people interested in the subject. At this event, Iria da Cunha presented arText claro with a talk entitled: “ArText. The first assisted writer for Spanish that helps to write texts in specialized fields and texts in clear language”. The event was held in dual format (onsite and online) and was a great success, with a participation of more than 300 attendees connected through the Internet.
The VII Congreso Internacional de Transparencia y Gobierno Abierto was held in Cartagena on September 28-30. It was organized by the Facultad de Ciencias de la Empresa of the Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena. One of the working groups of the congress was dedicated to “Lenguaje Transparente”. Its coordinator was Rafael Camacho. We participated in this working group with the talk entitled “Estructura y contenidos prototípicos de las resoluciones administrativas publicadas en portales web institucionales: una propuesta orientada al lenguaje claro”. In it, we commented on some of the results presented in this bibliographic reference:
Pistola, S.; da Cunha, I. (2022). «La resolución administrativa publicada en portales web institucionales: un análisis basado en corpus». Estudios de Lingüística. Universidad de Alicante (ELUA) 38. ISSN 2171-6692
On 21-23 September, the IV Congreso Internacional de didáctica de la lengua: Las nuevas tecnologías en la enseñanza de la lengua y la literatura (CONDILE), organised by the Facultad de Educación of the Universidad de Salamanca, was held. The arText team participated with the presentation «Análisis de herramientas digitales de ayuda a la redacción de textos académicos en español» (Juan A. Núñez and Iria da Cunha).
The XXXVIII Congreso de la Sociedad Española para el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural (SEPLN) was held in A Coruña from the 20th to the 23rd of September. The research group Grupo LyS, from the Universidad de A Coruña, was in charge of the organisation of the event. As part of the main programme of the congress, Iria da Cunha presented arText claro with a talk entitled “Un redactor asistido para adaptar textos administrativos a lenguaje claro”.
In addition, the Simposio Doctoral en Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural de la Red PLN.NET was held within the framework of the congress. It was attended by Sara Pistola, whose doctoral thesis is associated with the TIC-eADMIN project, in which arText is currently being developed.
The 69th issue of the journal Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural, editted by the Sociedad Española para el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural (SEPLN) has been published. It includes the article entitled “Un redactor asistido para adaptar textos administrativos a lenguaje claro”. The aim of this work is to present the development of arText claro, the first assisted editor for Spanish that helps public administration staff to write in plain language the texts they send to citizens. Different Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools are integrated in the system, thanks to which it manages to detect in the texts written by users the linguistic features that interfere with the most common plain language recommendations.
The reference of the article is:
Da Cunha, Iria. (2022). “Un redactor asistido para adaptar textos administrativos a lenguaje claro”. Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural 69. 39-49. ISSN: 1989-7553.
The team of the TIC-eADMIN project, in which arText is currently being developed, met virtually to allow the international members to attend. These are Maite Taboada, from the Simon Fraser University, and Gerardo Sierra, from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. From Spain, Juan A. Núñez (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), and Iria da Cunha, M. Ángeles Escobar, Susana Viñuales and Sara Pistola (from UNED) also assisted.
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 38th issue of the journal Estudios de Lingüística de la Universidad de Alicante (ELUA) has been published. This issue is a monograph on “Los géneros digitales en la interfaz del trabajo de corpus y el análisis del discurso especializado” coordinated by Chelo Vargas-Sierra and José A. Sánchez-Fajardo. It includes the article entitled “La resolución administrativa publicada en portales web institucionales: Un análisis basado en corpus”. This work focuses on the analysis of a textual genre in the field of administration that is currently disseminated almost exclusively through digital media, the resolution published on institutional web portals. To this end, the resolutions published on the website of the Boletín Oficial del Ayuntamiento de Madrid (BOAM) are taken as the object of study, and a linguistic analysis is carried out at textual and lexical level of a corpus consisting of 20 texts. A qualitative analysis of the digital features of this textual genre is also carried out.
The reference of the article is:
Pistola, Sara; Da Cunha, Iria (2021). “La resolución administrativa publicada en portales web institucionales: Un análisis basado en corpus”. ELUA 38. 17-45. ISSN: 2171-6692
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 XVI Jornada MEDES was held on 11 July as part of the summer courses of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) in San Lorenzo de El Escorial. The Fundación Lilly was in charge of organising the event. This conference has been a great success in terms of attendance, and it has had a great repercussion in the media. Some of the media that have mentioned it are: Acta sanitaria, Infosalus, [im]médico and La Vanguardia.
We participated in the round table entitled “Descubribilidad o el arte de hacer visible el contenido científico multilingüe”. Many topics were discussed, including the use of plain language in the field of administration and in other fields such as medicine. We were also able to mention the possibilities offered by arText claro for writing texts in plain language. The entire event can be viewed on YouTube. In particular, the round table in which we participated is available here.
Horacio Saggion, member of the Natural Language Processing Research Group (TALN) at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), invited us to present arText claro. The seminar was entitled: “A writing assistant to adapt administrative texts into plain language”.
On 30 June and 1 July, the international symposium “Sostenibilidad en el sector turístico: implementación y comunicación” was held in San Sebastián, organised by the Tecnun-Escuela de Ingeniería and the Instituto Cultura y Sociedad (ICS) of the Universidad de Navarra, within the framework of the project “KiNESIS: Alianzas de conocimiento para la innovación social ante la despoblación”. M. Ángeles Escobar, member of the arText team, presented the paper entitled “Applied linguistic technology and sustainable communication in Tourism” and showed the audience the arText tool that helps to write textual genres in the field of tourism in Spanish.
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.
The Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública (INAP) invited us to participate in the learning experience “Fundamentos de Gobierno Abierto” to talk about clear communication and to show the possibilities offered by arText claro to write administrative texts addressed to citizens in clear language. Specifically, we participated in the round table “Comunicación clara” together with Xavier Amatria, Estrella Montolío and Anabel Beltrán (moderator).
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.
On May 13, the research group COMINTRAD, from the Universidad Pablo de Olvide, invited us to give a conference on “Lenguaje claro, corpus y tecnologías lingüísticas”. It has been a pleasure to meet the members of this group and to share academic experiences!
On May 10 and 11, the colloquium Lenguaje claro y cultura de la legalidad. Estudios interdisciplinarios took place. It was organized by the Instituto Universitario de Investigación en Estudios Latinoamericanos (IELAT) of the Universidad de Alcalá and the Programa Interuniversitario en Cultura de la Legalidad. We participated with a talk entitled “Lenguaje claro y tecnología: una sinergia beneficiosa para la Administración pública”. Congratulations to all the speakers and the organisers!
On May 6th we took part in the XXVII Jornadas de Fomento de la Investigación en Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, organised by the Departamento de Traducción y Comunicación at Universidad Jaume I. Iria da Cunha gave a talk entitled “Escribe tus trabajos académicos en lenguaje claro”. Many thanks to the organisers for the invitation!
On April 30, the Seminario interno 2022-2 of the Grupo de Ingeniería Lingüística (GIL), Instituto de Ingeniería, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) was held. We were invited to present arText, with a talk entitled “Una herramienta tecnológica de ayuda a la redacción de géneros textuales de ámbitos especializados y de textos en lenguaje claro: el sistema arText”. It was streamed on Facebook live (@ingenieriaLinguistica). Now, you can watch the video here.
The Instituto Vasco de Administración Pública (IVAP) publishes the journal Administrazioa Euskaraz. Issue 116 has just been published. It includes an article explaining how arText and arText claro can help to write texts in the Administration field. It can be consulted here.
Article reference:
Da Cunha, Iria. (2022). “ArText sistema: Administrazioa eta herritarrak errazago komunikatzeko erredaktore laguntzailea“. Administrazioa Euskaraz 116. 19-20. ISSN 1576-5563
The Instituto de Idiomas of the Universidad del Norte (Colombia) has celebrated the Semana del Idioma. The organisers invited us to present arText and arText claro as part of the activity “Tecnologías para potenciar el lenguaje”. It was a pleasure to participate! 🙂
Issue 42 of Ibérica includes two publications related to the arText project.
Firstly, the article “Comparing textual genres in Spanish: the case of the tourism domain” is published. The goals of this research are: a) to carry out a linguistic analysis of three genres from the tourism domain on the textual, lexico-grammatical and discourse levels to gain a comprehensive understanding of the features of these text types, and b) to compare these genres in order to identify statistically significant differences among them and show that some specific linguistic features are prototypical of each one. This linguistic information is integrated in the arText tool to write the following genres of the tourism field: informative article, travel blog post and rules and regulations.
Secondly, it includes a review by Dámaso Izquierdo-Alegría of the book “El discurso del ámbito de la administración. Una perspectiva lingüística“, published by Iria da Cunha in 2020 (Editorial Comares).
The references of the publications are:
Da Cunha, Iria; Montané, M. Amor; Fisas, Beatriz; Escobar, M. Ángeles (2021). «Comparing textual genres in Spanish: the case of the tourism domain». Ibérica 42. 163-190. ISSN 1139-7241
Izquierdo-Alegría, Dámaso (2021). «El Discurso del ámbito de la Administración. Una perspectiva lingüística. Iria da Cunha. Granada: Editorial Comares, 2020, 210 Páginas. ISBN: 978- 84-9045-955-3». Ibérica, 42. 250-254. ISSN 1139-7241
The 4th World Conference on Research in Teaching and Education (WORLDTE) was held between March 18-20. It took place in Prague (Czech Republic) thanks to the organization of Acavent.
M. Ángeles Escobar, member of the arText team, gave two presentations: “Connectors in L2 English Writing: A Case Study” and “Teaching Discourse Connectors in Tourism Studies”. In both talks, she mentioned the recommendations related to connectors offered by the arText system for Spanish.
An article entitled “El impacto del uso de herramientas automáticas de ayuda a la redacción en el proceso de escritura de estudiantes universitarios” has been published in the journal Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación. The aim of the article is to determine the impact of the recommendations offered by an automatic assisted writing system (specifically, the arText system) on academic texts written by university students.
Article reference:
Da Cunha, Iria; Núñez, Juan A. (2021). «El impacto del uso de herramientas automáticas de ayuda a la redacción en el proceso de escritura de estudiantes universitarios». Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación 89. 131-144. e-ISSN 1576-4737
The article entitled “Una herramienta automática para el aprendizaje de los conectores discursivos” has been published in the journal Tejuelo. The aim of this article is to show the functionalities of the arText system that incorporate discourse information, such as connectors. The authors’ motivation is to help students to improve their use of connectors by reviewing their texts with the tool.
Article reference:
Da Cunha, Iria; Escobar, M. Ángeles (2022). “Una herramienta automática para el aprendizaje de los conectores discursivos”. Tejuelo, 35(2). 205-233. ISSN: 1988-8430
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. 🙂
Sheila Queralt, director of the Laboratorio SQ, invited us to give a seminar organized by the Departamento de I+D+i en Lingüística Forense. The title of the talk was: “Análisis y clasificación de recomendaciones sobre lenguaje claro en español en el ámbito jurídico-administrativo”. Thank you very much for the invitation!
For more information about the topic of the talk, you can consult this article published by Iria da Cunha and M. Ángeles Escobar in the journal Pragmalingüística (issue 29).
The Workshop “La escritura del TFG y del TFM en Educación”, organized by the Centro de Escritura of the Facultad de Formación de Profesorado y Educación of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, coordinated by Juan A. Núñez, took place from 17th – 21st January. We gave the opening presentation entitled “Escritura y contenidos prototípicos de un TFG y un TFM”. During the talk, we mentioned the arText tool for writing the TFG. The tool shows the user the prototypical structure, contents and phraseology of this type of academic work.
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.
Archiletras científica issue number 6, on “Tecnologías de la Lengua aplicadas al español”, has been published. The article by Iria da Cunha entitled “Discurso y tecnologías lingüísticas en español” mentions arText and arText claro as examples of technological tools in which discourse information is integrated.
All the information about the issue can be found 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).
Jadranka Gladic will carry out her doctoral thesis within the framework of the arText project thanks to the “Programa de doctorado en filología. Estudios lingüísticos y literarios” of the Facultad de Filología of the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED). The topic of her thesis is: “El Trabajo de Fin de Grado en Derecho Administrativo: un análisis comparativo entre España y Chile”.
Congratulations and welcome to the team, Jadranka!
