Sara Pistola, member of the arText team and student of the PhD program in Philology at UNED, presented the sistema arText at the III Jornadas de Corrección de Textos en Español (IIIJCTE), organized by the Universidad del Salvador and held virtually on June 1st and 2nd. Sara’s presentation was entitled “The arText system as a tool for writing texts in specialized fields and in clear language” and you can watch it in the following video:

Yesterday, Jadranka Gladic, lecturer at the Pontífica Universidad Católica de Valparaiso, student of the PhD program in Philology at UNED since 2021 and member of the arText team, gave, as part of the pre- and post-doctoral seminars of the arText team, the seminar entitled “The Final Degree Project in Administrative Law: a comparative analysis between Spain and Chile”. Jadranka Gladic presented the objectives, methodology and first results of her doctoral thesis, supervised by Dr. Iria da Cunha.

Iria da Cunha, director of the arText team, presented arText claro at the Clear Writing for Europe 2023 conference. In this edition, the conference was about “Supporting European democracy and transparency through clear language”, with the aim of discussing how public administrations and the European Union can communicate in a clearer way when writing texts addressed to citizens. Iria participated in the Workshop “Drafting and editing tools and resources” together with Stéphanie Guillaume, with the presentation “arText claro: A writing Assistant to draft Spanish administrative texts in plain language”. The conference was attended by more than 1200 people.

Jia Chen, member of the arText team and student of the PhD program in Education at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), presented the progress of her doctoral thesis, supervised by Dr. Iria da Cunha (UNED) and Dr. Juan Antonio Núñez (UAM), at the VIII Jornadas de Doctorado en Educación de la UAM. The conference took place on May 18 and 19 at the Facultad de Formación de Profesorado y Educación of the UAM. The seminar given by Jia Chen was entitled “The use of arText in teaching Spanish as a foreign language to Chinese students: advances in the study”.

Iria da Cunha participated in the IV edition of Un Mundo de Fusión Digital, which took place yesterday at the headquarters of the Escuelas Pías in UNED Madrid. This event aimed to open a dialogue between humanities and technology through various conversations between professionals from different fields. Iria da Cunha participated in the space dedicated to artificial intelligence (AI) along with other specialists. She explained the importance of the sistema arText in the current context and highlighted the importance of interdisciplinary work to achieve integrative and respectful projects in the fields of AI, humanities and technology. The full program is available here and a photo gallery of the event can be viewed here.

Iria da Cunha and Juan Antonio Núñez Cortés participated in the II Jornadas Online de Proyectos de Investigación I+D+i held by the Departamento de Filologías Extranjeras y sus Lingüísticas at UNED. The conference, presented by M. Dolores Castrillo, Department’s director, included four competitive research projects that are currently underway and concluded with a round table on good practices in the implementation of R&D+i projects. Iria da Cunha presented the 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). Also, Juan Antonio Núñez talked about one of the studies being carried out in the framework of arText_IMPACT: “Comprensión lectora, percepción de claridad y herramientas digitales“. You can retrieve all the presentations of the conference at this link and, also, you can see the talks concerning the sistema arText below:

Yesterday, Sara Pistola, member of the arText team and student of the PhD program in Philology at UNED, gave a seminar entitled “Teaching Administrative Law through its textual genres” as part of the pre and post-doctoral seminars of the arText team. In this forum, Sara Pistola contextualized her research and presented the objectives, methodology and preliminary results of her doctoral thesis.

M. Ángeles Escobar and Eva Samaniego, members of the arText team and professors at the Departamento de Filologías Extranjeras y sus Lingüísticas from the Facultad de Filología in UNED, participated in the 40th International Conference of the Spanish Association of Applied Linguistics (AESLA 2023). The conference was held in Mérida on April 26-28. The paper presented by M. Ángeles and Eva is entitled “An English-Spanish contrastive analysis of the recommendations on plain language in the legal-administrative field” and is part of the TIC-eADMIN project.

On March 22 we participated in the conference “Comunicación clara y lenguaje administrativo. Por una administración al servicio de las personas”, organized by the Conselleria de Participació, Transparència, Cooperació i Qualitat Democràtica of the Generalitat Valenciana. Iria da Cunha gave a talk entitled “Herramientas y recursos para la comunicación clara”, in which she presented technological tools related to plain language, such as arText claro.

The recording of the presentation can be viewed here:

On January 18th we were in Zaragoza, in the Workshop on Comunicación clara para unidades de Transparencia organized by the Laboratorio de Aragón [Gobierno] Abierto (LAAAB). The workshop brought together several specialists to talk about transparency and clear communication. In addition, we had the opportunity to show the attendees the possibilities offered by arText claro to write administrative texts addressed to citizens in a simpler language.

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 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!

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.

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:

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.

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 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.