The Plain Language Commission of the Poder Judicial of Chile has released the second edition of its bulletin, devoted to exploring the role of new technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) in promoting accessible language. This issue includes an interview with Iria da Cunha about arText.
More information here.
The Real Academia Española (RAE) invited Iria da Cunha to participate as a speaker in the panel “La inteligencia artificial: oportunidad y desafío para el lenguaje claro” at the II Convención de la Red Panhispánica de Lenguaje Claro y Accesible of the RAE in Lima (Peru). The presentation was titled “Lenguaje claro e inteligencia artificial: aproximaciones metodológicas a la evaluación de herramientas”.
You can watch the full panel here and see the program here.
The Ayuntamiento de Valencia has joined the initiatives on plain communication. Today it held a very fruitful event titled “Comunicación clara, administración eficaz. IA y otras herramientas”. The guest speakers were Cristina Pérez Galán, Xosé Castro, and Iria da Cunha. Iria’s talk was titled “Presentación de herramientas de inteligencia artificial aplicables al lenguaje claro en el ámbito administrativo”.
The course “El derecho a entender” was held at the Universidad de Salamanca. It was aimed at judges and magistrates and organized by the Escuela Judicial of the Consejo General del Poder Judicial of Spain. The invited speakers included magistrates, linguists, translators, and psychologists, all sharing a common goal: to communicate more effectively with citizens. Iria da Cunha delivered the lecture “Lenguaje jurídico claro e inteligencia artificial”. She also led the workshop “Herramientas y recursos para la redacción asistida en lenguaje jurídico claro”, where judges and magistrates clarified their own texts using technological tools.
On June 26, Montserrat Bermúdez, Iria da Cunha, and Maite Taboada presented their paper “Choosing clear variants for English terms from the legal-administrative domain within the EU: A glossary proposal” at the 19th International Pragmatics Conference at The University of Queensland (Australia). Specifically, they participated in the panel “Choosing the best words for clear accessible communication,” organized by Cliff Goddard and Helen Bromhead. The paper includes the results of the project “Plain language and natural language processing in legal-administrative texts in English: the European Commission as a case study (EUPlainTech)” (PID2022-143092NB-I00), funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities.
Iria da Cunha and Amor Montané presented the Catalan version of the arText system in Barcelona. The event was attended by representatives from the Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalan Government) and the Government of the Balearic Islands, co-funders of the project, as well as from the UNED Barcelona and Balearic Islands centers, the Institute for Catalan Studies, the Institute for Applied Linguistics, and Termcat, among others.
Access to the system: https://sistema-artext.com/ca/
More information on the UNED website and the Generalitat de Catalunya website.
The following article has just been published, which includes some results of Sara Pistola’s thesis, defended in July 2024 at the UNED, and co-directed by Iria da Cunha and Susana Viñuales.
Pistola, Sara; Da Cunha, Iria (2024). «Análisis y clarificación de un corpus de fraseología administrativa: una propuesta orientada al uso del lenguaje claro en la Administración española». Logos: Revista de Lingüística, Filosofía y Literatura, 34(2). 494-522. ISSN 0719-3262
“La enseñanza-aprendizaje de la lengua y la literatura a través de las TIC’ (Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca) has just been published. The publication includes a chapter by Juan Antonio Núñez and Iria Da Cunha (arText team) on digital tools to help writing academic texts in Spanish. You can read the chapter and the full publication through this link.
M. Betulia Pedraza, member of the Neolocyt group at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, in the framework of the arText team’s research seminars, presented two products derived from her doctoral thesis to improve communication between the Administration and citizens: CorpusPAP and DiPAP.
Thank you, María Betulia, for agreeing to share your knowledge of lexicography and plain language with the arText team!
Iria da Cunha, director of the arText team and lecturer at the Departamento de Filologías Extranjeras y sus Lingüísticas from the Facultad de Filología at UNED, has given the TREMÉDICA cyberseminar entitled “Herramientas y recursos de tecnología lingüística para la medicina” (Language technology tools and resources for medicine). In the course, Iria showed several language technology tools and resources that can be useful for humanistic profiles and health professionals.One of these tools is the arText system, which helps to write texts from different specialized fields, including medicine.
Yesterday we started with the biweekly research seminar mainly for arText team pre- and post-doctoral researchers. The seminars aim to be a meeting point to share progress, put ideas in common, establish links between the team members, follow up on the various ongoing projects and disseminate areas of scientific interest. In short, these seminars aim to be a collaborative space to highlight plain language and areas of interest in this discipline.
Carlos José Blandón Ruiz has defended his TFM entitled “ArText como recurso didáctico para la redacción de textos expositivos” at the Universidad Panamericana de Nicaragua. In his work, he has used arText as a didactic resource to develop the writing skills of a group of high school students. The director of the TFM was Dr. Margarita Míxter Moreno.
Thank you, Carlos, for bringing arText to Nicaragua and for exploring new applications of the system!
Recently, the Ministry of Universities has awarded a María Zambrano grant for the attraction of international talent to Sabela Fernández Silva, assistant professor at the Instituto de Literatura y Ciencias del Lenguaje of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. On January 1st she will join the Departamento de Filologías Extranjeras y sus Lingüísticas of the UNED to work on the development of new functionalities of arText for 2 years.
Congratulations! We are very happy to be able to expand our team.
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 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.
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!
The presentation “Textual genres presenting writing difficulties in the field of tourism: a semiautomatic corpus-based linguistic analysis” has been accepted in the 21st Conference on Language for specific purposes 2017 (LSP 2017), which will take place in Bergen (Norway) from 28 to 30 June, 2017.