The 2023 edition of the INNOVADORASTIC program publication “Mujeres referentes del Siglo XXI” was presented today in Madrid. Iria da Cunha, one of the interviewees who appears in the publication as a leading scientist woman of the 21st century, participated in this event along with Marina Sánchez and Cynthia Gálvez. The three researchers talked about their respective work in the field of science and technology.
The UNED and the Sociedad Española de Medicina de Familia y Comunitaria (semFYC) have signed this morning, at the semFYC headquarters in Barcelona, a General Protocol of Action that will help to advance in the development of the sistema arText in the field of medicine.
The event was attended by:
Both semFYC and UNED have published this news : semFYC press release / UNED press release.
The arText team will continue working on plain language and natural language processing thanks to the new Generación de Conocimiento project granted by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación e Universidades. The project is entitled “Plain language and natural language processing in legal-administrative texts in English: the European Commission as a case study (EUPlainTech)”.
Consult the resolution here.
The Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) has become a member of the Red Panhispánica de Lenguaje Claro (Pan-Hispanic Plain Language Network), promoted by the Real Academia Española (RAE). On the occasion of this initiative, Iria da Cunha, director of the arText team at UNED, met with Santiago Muñoz Machado, director of this network, to discuss the projects on plain language and artificial intelligence that are being carried out by the arText team.
Yesterday we inaugurated the pre- and postdoctoral seminar of the arText team. This first seminar was given by Sabela Fernández-Silva, postdoctoral researcher María Zambrano at UNED. Sabela spoke to us about the “Ethical procedures for research with people at UNED”, with the aim of ensuring that the different studies comply with the rules of ethics and data protection.
Josep Villullas has joined the arText team (Departamento de Filologías Extranjeras y sus Lingüísticas at UNED) to work as a computer scientist and technologist in the arText_IMPACT “Prueba de Concepto” project (2022-2024), directed by Dr. Iria da Cunha and funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation
A new space on the sistema arText has been launched in the eScience data repository of the Consorcio Madroño. In this space you can find results of the TIC-eADMIN and arText_IMPACT projects which, at the same time, are part of the results of Sara Pistola’s doctoral thesis in progress, supervised by Dr. Iria da Cunha and Dr. Susana Viñuales.
The bibliographic references of the publications currently available are:
A review of our book “Lenguaje claro y tecnología en la Administración” (Iria da Cunha, Ed. 2022, Editorial Comares) has been published in issue 178 of the Punto y Coma bulletin of the European Union. The author of the review is Leire Segura (European Commission) and it is available here (p. 15-22). 
The UNED and the Academia Joven de España (AJE) have signed a collaboration agreement with the aim of promoting scientific dissemination. Specifically, research work, studies, publications and dissemination of results on topics of common interest will be carried out. The rector of the university, Ricardo Mairal; the president of the Academia Joven de España, Javier García Martínez; the vice-rector for Research, Knowledge Transfer and Scientific Dissemination of the UNED,Rosa María Martín Aranda, and the UNED professors and members of the AJE, Iria da Cunha Fanego, director of the arText team, and Borja Franco Llopis, will participate in the events to be held on the occasion of the agreement.
Jenny Azarian has joined the arText team in the framework of the arText_IMPACT project, funded by the 2022 call for “Prueba de Concepto” projects of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (2022-2024).
In addition, Jenny is currently carrying out a PhD in the Doctoral Program in Philology at UNED. The topic of her thesis is related to the evaluation of the impact of the use of arText claro on the comprehension and the perceived clarity of texts by vulnerable groups.
The arText system has reached 200,000 users. Thank you very much to those of you who make it possible for our project to continue to grow from Spain, Mexico, Chile…🎉
On March 15, the presentation of the book “Lenguaje claro y tecnología en la Administración”, published in the Interlingua Collection of Editorial Comares, was held at the Escuelas Pías location of the UNED (Madrid). This book is the result of the research carried out by the arText team within the framework of two projects financed by the Ministry of Science and Innovation:
The recording of the presentation can be viewed on YouTube:
On December 21, 2022, the final resolution by which the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation awarded the grants for “Prueba de concepto” 2022 projects was published. Our project “A technological prototype for writing in plain language: incorporation in public administration and analysis of its impact on citizens” (arText_IMPACT) has been one of those selected. It will last 2 years and to carry it out we have obtained a funding of 109,250 euros. Let’s go for it!
We are very happy to announce the publication of the book entitled “Lenguaje claro y tecnología en la Administración”, edited by Iria da Cunha and with the participation of several members of the arText team as authors of the different chapters. The prologue is written by Ricardo Mairal, rector of the UNED. The book is published in the Interlingua collection of Editorial Comares and includes part of the research carried out in the context of the TIC-eADMIN project, one of the projects through which arText has been developed in recent years.
You can obtain more information about the book at the following link: https://www.comares.com/libro/lenguaje-claro-y-tecnologia-en-la-administracion_145665/
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, 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 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 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 arText system has exceeded 100,000 users! Many thanks to all of them for keeping the project growing nationally and internationally. 🙂
The article entitled “Recomendaciones sobre lenguaje claro en español en el ámbito jurídico-administrativo: análisis y clasificación” has been published today in the journal Pragmalingüística. The aim of the article is to analyse the recommendations on plain language written in Spanish that are included in the most relevant and current sources on the subject, in order to classify them according to the level of the language to which they refer. This systematization of the plain language recommendations was used as the basis for the creation of arText claro. We encourage you to read the article and use arText claro!
The reference of the article is as follows:
Da Cunha, Iria; Escobar, M. Ángeles (2021). “Recomendaciones sobre lenguaje claro en español en el ámbito jurídico-administrativo: análisis y clasificación”. Pragmalingüística, 29. 129-148. ISSN 1133-682X
The Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) and the Ayuntamiento de Madrid signed the “Protocolo de colaboración en investigación científica en materia de comunicación clara”. The document was signed by Rosa María Martín Aranda, Vicerrectora de Investigación, Transferencia del Conocimiento y Divulgación Científica of the UNED, and by Begoña Villacís Sánchez, in her capacity as head of the Área de Gobierno de Vicealcaldía of the Ayuntamiento de Madrid. Silvia Saavedra, concejala delegada de Coordinación Territorial, Transparencia y Participación Ciudadana, was present at the event.
The motivation of this collaboration is that the Ayuntamiento de Madrid, through the Subdirección General de Calidad y Evaluación, collaborates in the TIC-eADMIN research project. As part of this project, arText‘s new functionalities are being developed to help the Administration’s staff to write texts addressed to the citizens. Currently, arText claro has already been developed, a system that helps to write administrative texts addressed to citizens in plain language. However, thanks to the collaboration with the Ayuntamiento de Madrid, arText will also incorporate new functionalities that help public workers to write some specific types of texts, such as, for example, a requirement, a resolution or a contract. The aim is that the technological tool will not only offer recommendations on plain language, as it already does thanks to arText claro, but it will also help the users to structure and draft certain types of specific documents.
We have updated the infographic that explains how to use the arText system (and arText claro) in 6 easy steps.
The arText team participates in the 75th number of the Journal of Language and Law with two publications. The first one is the article “Una clasificación actualizada de los géneros textuales de la Administración pública española” (Sara Pistola and Susana Viñuales). It can be consulted here. The second is a review by Cristina Carretero of the book “El discurso del ámbito de la Administración: una perspectiva lingüística”, published by Iria da Cunha in 2020 (Editorial Comares). The review is entitled “El proceso comunicativo entre la Administración y la ciudadanía: especial perspectiva del ciudadano como emisor del mensaje” and can be consulted here.
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.
We have recorded a video tutorial so that you can see how to use the two arText system tools: arText (for writing textual genres in specialized fields) and arText claro (for writing texts in plain language).
It lasts less than 7 minutes and you can watch it here:
The arText system has just been updated. Now, in addition to helping to write textual genres in specialized fields, it incorporates a new tool, called arText claro, which helps to write in clear language the texts that the Administration addresses to the citizens.
Try the new arText claro tool 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 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.
We have designed an infographic explaining how to use the arText system in 6 easy steps.
You can download the interactive PDF here.
We have prepared a short demo of arText (2 minutes), which explains the main functionalities of the system.
The video gives the example of the administrative text “letter of complaint”, but the guidelines are valid for all the texts included in arText.
We are pleased to announce the publication of the book entitled “El discurso del ámbito de la Administración: una perspectiva lingüística”, written by Iria da Cunha and with a foreword by M. Teresa Cabré. The book is published in the Interlingua collection of Editorial Comares and includes part of the research carried out in the context of our arText projects.
You can find more information about the book at the following link: https://www.comares.com/libro/el-discurso-del-ambito-de-la-administracion_117993/
The arText system already has over 45,000 users. Thank you to all of them for making the project grow! 🙂
Our colleagues from the Delegación de Chile de la Asociación Latinoamericana de Estudios del Discurso (ALED-Chile) and the Grupo de Investigación Interdisciplinario en Discurso Académico, Científico y Profesional (GRIDACIP) have organized the Primera Jornada “Escritura Académica y Discurso Especializado”. The arText team presented two papers at the conference.
On the one hand, Sara Pistola and Susana Viñuales presented the paper entitled «Recopilación, selección y clasificación de los géneros textuales de la Administración Pública española». In this talk, they explained the progress being made within the framework of the current research project (TIC-eADMIN) financed by the Ministry of Science, Research and Universities.
On the other hand, Juan Antonio Núñez and Iria da Cunha introduced the paper entitled «Un análisis del impacto del sistema arText en la redacción del Trabajo de Fin de Grado». Their objective was to establish the impact of the recommendations offered by arText on the review of the Trabajo de Fin de Grado (Final Project) done by university students.
All the conferences of the day are still available on its Youtube channel.
Click here to see the presentation “Compilation, selection and classification of text genres in the Spanish Public Administration” (starts at minute 02:09:51).
Click here to see the presentation “An analysis of the impact of the arText system in the writing of the End of Degree Project” (starts at minute 46:45).
The FPI doctoral student Sara Pistola presented a talk at the V International Congress on Transparency (CIT 2020), which this year was held virtually and has been inaugurated by the rector of the UNED, Ricardo Mairal, and the minister Carolina Darias.
The paper was entitled “The compilation of administrative textual genres: a difficult task” and explained the difficulties involved in compiling the textual genres of the Spanish Public Administration and the strategies used to overcome them.
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 “A technological application that helps citizens write texts to the Public Administration” has been published today in the journal Linguamática. The aim of the article is to explain the specific application of the arText system that helps to write textual genres addressed to the Administration, specifically an allegation, a cover letter, a letter of complaint, a claim and an application. We encourage you to read the article and use arText!
Article reference:
da Cunha, Iria (2020). “Una aplicación tecnológica que ayuda a la ciudadanía a escribir textos a la Administración pública”. Linguamática, 12(1). 97-115. ISSN 1647-0818
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!
This morning the Iberlegal Conference 2019 was held in Madrid, entitled “Recursos y aplicaciones de tecnologías del lenguaje para el dominio legal en lenguas de la Península Ibérica”. This conference is organized within the framework of Plan de Tecnologías del Lenguaje (Plan TL) promoted by the Secretaría de Estado para el Avance Digital (SEAD) of the Ministerio de Economía y Empresa. In this framework, we have given the talk “The arText system: a technological application that helps citizens write texts to the Public Administration”.
The program of the conference can be consulted here.
The arText presentation can be downloaded here.
The article titled “A corpus-based analysis of textual genres in the administration domain” has been published in the Discourse Studies journal, indexed in the Journal Citation Reports of Web of Science. In this work, we explain the methodology of the corpus compilation and analysis used in the arText project, taking the administration domain as a case study.
Article reference:
da Cunha, Iria; Montané, M. Amor (2020). «A corpus-based analysis of textual genres in the administration domain». Discourse Studies 22(1). 3-31. ISSN 1461-4456
Within the framework of the research seminars of the IXA group of the Faculty of Informatics of the University of the Basque Country/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (San Sebastián), this afternoon we have given a talk about arText, entitled “El Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural (PLN) como recurso para el desarrollo de herramientas automáticas de ayuda a la redacción”.
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 article titled “Textual genres and writing difficulties in specialized domains” has been accepted for publication in Revista Signos. Estudios de Lingüística, indexed in the Social Science Citation Index. The article will be published in March 2019, but it is already available in the Advanced articles section of the journal.
Article reference:
da Cunha, Iria; Montané, M. Amor (2019). “Textual genres and writing difficulties in specialized domains”. Revista Signos. Estudios de Lingüística 52(99). 4-30. ISSN 07180934
In June 2018, Vernon Press has published a new book, “Convergence of ESP with other disciplines”. The first chapter of this book is titled “Designing Writing Materials for Tourism Text Genres through Technological Tools”. In this chapter, we study the possibilities that arText offers to university lecturers to use it with tourism students.
Article reference:
Escobar, M. Ángeles; da Cunha, Iria (2018). «Designing Writing Materials for Tourism Text Genres through Technological Tools». In Hurajová, Ľudmila; Chmelíková, Gabriela; Stojkovic, Nadezda (Eds.). Convergence of ESP with other disciplines. Wilmington, USA: Vernon Press. ISBN 978-1-62273-429-0
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!
From October 27th to 28th, 2017, the International ESP Conference on Convergence of ESP with Other Disciplines took place at Conference Centre at Liverpool Hope University (UK). In this framework, we gave a talk explaining how arText can be used as a tool to teach university subjects related to tourism. The title of the talk was “Revisiting tourism text genres presenting writing difficulties to students: designing materials through a semi-automatic corpus”.
From October 19th to 20th, 2017, the 5th IberoAmerican Workshop “Research on Didactics of Academic and Professional Writing” took place at the Centro de Formación del Profesorado (Teacher Training Center) from the Faculty of Education of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. On this occasion the workshop has dealt with “Gender and strategies for writing in academic and professional contexts”.
The DIDACTEXT group (Research in Didactics of Writing), organizer of this 5th IberoAmerican Workshop, invited us to give a talk, entitled “Presentation of arText, an online text editor”, which took place on Thursday, October 19th at 7:00 p.m.
Click here to see the seminar leaflet.
Today the 6th Workshop “Recent Advances in RST and Related Formalisms” was held in the framework of the International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG 2017) at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. In the afternoon session we gave an invited talk about the arText system.
Thanks to all the attendees and to the Organizing Committee for the invitation!
Today we gave a talk about the arText project at the 21st Conference on Language for Specific Purposes 2017 (LSP 2017), held at the NHH Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen (Norway). The title of the talk was “Textual genres presenting writing difficulties in the field of tourism: a semiautomatic corpus-based linguistic analysis”.
Click here to see the conference program.
Click here to see the abstract book.
