On 26 November, the II Jornadas de la Red Nacional de Calidad Normativa were held, organised by the Oficina de Coordinación y Calidad Normativa of the Ministerio de la Presidencia, Relaciones con las Cortes y Memoria Democrática of Spain. We participated with a talk entitled “El sistema arText como recurso tecnológico para la redacción de normas en lenguaje claro”. Thank you very much for the invitation!
The Consejería de Transparencia, Participación y Administración Pública and the Escuela de Formación e Innovación Pública de la Administración Pública (EFIAP) of the Región de Murcia, with the collaboration of Fundación NovaGob, organized the Jornada “La tecnología al servicio del lenguaje claro en la Administración”. It was celebrated on 15 November in a dual format. In total, more than 100 people attended.
We participated to present arText claro with a conference entitled “Redacción asistida de textos administrativos en lenguaje claro: el caso del sistema arText”. The event is available to watch on YouTube here.
On Wednesday 3 November we participated in a conference organized by the Programa de Posgrado en Lingüística of the Universidad de Costa Rica by invitation of its director, Adrián Vergara Heidke. The presentation was entitled: “Una herramienta para la redacción asistida de textos administrativos dirigidos a la ciudadanía: arText claro”.
From 26 to 29 October, the XVII Simposio Iberoamericano de Terminología (RITerm 2020-2021) was celebrated. This year’s theme was: “Inclusión y terminología en la sociedad actual”. The event was held online from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) with Gerardo Sierra (Grupo de Ingeniería Lingüística, UNAM) as the president of the organizing committee.
We participated with the communication entitled “Latinismos y expresiones arcaicas en el ámbito de la Administración: hacia la búsqueda de alternativas más claras”. In it, we explained the process that we followed to implement the recommendation “Sustitución de expresiones difíciles de entender” in arText claro.
On 28 and 29 October, the Congreso NovaGob 2021: VIII Congreso de Innovación Pública was held. It was organized by Fundación NovaGob with the participation of Gobierno de Aragón, Fundación Democracia y Gobierno Local, and Laboratorio de Aragón Gobierno Abierto (LAAB). We participated in the “Desafíos en 10 minutos” with a communication entitled “ArText claro contra el muro del lenguaje administrativo”. It was recorded and can be watched here.
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 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.
From 4 to 8 October, the 3rd edition of the Encuentros sobre lenguaje claro “EnClaro” was held, organized by Antonio Martín (Cálamo y Cran) and Arsenio Escolar (Archiletras), and directed by Isabel Espuelas.
Iria da Cunha was in charge of opening the event with a talk entitled “Lenguaje claro y tecnología: el caso de arText claro”. She also participated in the round table that took place on 8 October together with Víctor González (Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria) and Romina Sparano (Language Compass). The topic of the round table was “Cómo poner en marcha un plan de claridad”.
On 27-29 September, the VI Congreso Internacional de Transparencia was held at the University of Alicante. We participated in the Grupo de Trabajo GT21-02 Lenguaje transparente, coordinated by Rafael Camacho Muñoz.
The presentation was entitled “El primer redactor asistido para escribir en lenguaje claro textos administrativos en español”. It included an online demonstration of arText claro, the arText tool that helps to write texts in plain language.
The Seminario Internacional sobre Centros de Escritura en Universidades Españolas was held on 20-21 September. It was organized by the Proyecto de Innovación Educativa PIE 19-098 of the Universidad de Málaga (UMA), and the Centro de Escritura de la Facultad de Formación de Profesorado y Educación of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), coordinated by Juan Antonio Núñez.
The paper we presented was entitled: “ArText como recurso tecnológico de acompañamiento en las tutorías de escritura académica”. In it, we talked about the role that the arText system can play as a resource to help students and teachers in academic writing tutorships.
We have updated the infographic that explains how to use the arText system (and arText claro) in 6 easy steps.
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! 
On 14-15 June, the IV Jornadas Internacionales de Transversalidad en la Docencia were held at Universidad Nebrija. We presented a communication entitled “Un redactor asistido para la elaboración del Trabajo de Fin de Grado”, related to the arText tool that helps to write the TFG.
The communication team of Nebrija University has prepared a news item about the conference. You can read it here.
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.
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.
On 3 June, the round table “PLN para solucionar problemas sociales” was held. It was organised by DiverTLes, a community of women working and researching in Language Technologies in Spain created by the “Red de Dinamización de Actividades en Tecnologías de Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural” (PLN.NET).
Iria da Cunha participated with a presentation entitled “ArText: un redactor asistido que tiene en cuenta las necesidades de diferentes colectivos sociales”. The event was recorded and it is available on YouTube.
Mikel Iruskieta (Universidad del País Vasco) and Juliano Desiderato Antonio (Universidade Estadual de Maringá) have invited us to participate in the Symposium “Rhetorical Structure Theory: a discoursive perspective for linguistic analysis and applied linguistics”. This Symposium is part of the II Seminar “Caminhos para a pesquisa em Descrição Linguística”, organised by the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras Mestrado e Doutorado, Universidade Estadual de Maringá (Brazil).
Our talk was entitled “Discourse-related recommendations in a computer assisted writing system”. We have shown the design and computational implementation of the discourse-related recommendations included in arText.
Ricardo Jiménez Yáñez, lecturer at UIC Barcelona, invited us to participate in the II Jornadas de Lenguaje Jurídico “Rebus Sic Stantibus”, which took place on the 27th and 28th of May. Iria da Cunha presented a conference in which she showed a series of resources and tools for writing legal texts in plain language, including arText claro. The recording is available here.
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.
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.
On 18 May, the Jornada de Proyectos de Investigación I+D+i de lengua, lingüística y literatura organised by the Departamento de Filologías Extranjeras y sus Lingüísticas, Facultad de Filología, at UNED was held. The conference was created with the aim of giving visibility to the funded research projects that are being carried out in the departament, among them, the TIC-eADMIN project, in which arText is currently being developed.
Three members of the TIC-eADMIN project team took part in the conference: Iria da Cunha, Gerardo Sierra and Maite Taboada. The recordings of the presentations are available on Canal UNED:
Esther Monzó, professor in the Departamento de Traducción y Comunicación at the Universitat Jaume I, invited us to give a conference-workshop at the XXVI Jornadas de Fomento de la Investigación en Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, which took place on May 14th. The conference was entitled “La dirección a distancia de los trabajos académicos en ciencias humanas y sociales: herramientas, recursos y materiales para profesorado y alumnado”.
More information on the conference can be found in this article.
On 11-13 May, took place the XI Jornadas de Investigación en Innovación Docente de la UNED. This year, the theme of the sessions was “Avances en la formación híbrida y en línea para una educación post-pandemia”. Silvia Sánchez Calderón and Iria da Cunha participated in the event with a talk entitled “El MOOC como herramienta de enseñanza-aprendizaje en la elaboración de un Trabajo de Fin de Grado”. This work was carried out in the framework of the Innovative Didactic Group for Open Linguistic Glosary Applications (OLGA).
In the communication, they talked about the MOOC “La redacción del Trabajo de Fin de Grado en seis pasos”, whose 2nd edition starts in November 2021. In this MOOC, different materials are employed, such as the book “El trabajo de fin de grado y de máster: Redacción, defensa y publicación” (Iria da Cunha). In addition, the arText tool for writing the TFG is recommended to university students.
The communication can be seen on Canal UNED:
On May 13 and 14, the III Congreso Internacional enTRetextos: Géneros discursivos, corpus y traducción en contextos profesionales y académicos. Desafíos y oportunidades en la era digital took place. Sara Pistola and Iria da Cunha participated with the talk entitled “Los géneros textuales de la Administración en el contexto universitario: el punto de vista de los estudiantes del ámbito jurídico”.
The communication presented the results of a survey carried out among students of Administrative Law at the UNED. The aim of the survey was to determine the administrative textual genres that students have to write more frequently and which ones generate the most writing difficulties for them.
The recording is available on YouTube.
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! 🙂
On 16, 22 and 30 April 2021, it was held the I Seminario Internacional Interuniversitario de Lectura y Escritura en la Universidad “La escritura académica”, organised by the Red Internacional de Universidades Lectoras (RIUL), the Universidad de Extremadura, the Universidad de Jaén and the Universidad de León. Iria da Cunha participated in the seminar with a talk entitled “El sistema arText como recurso para la redacción en línea de textos profesionales y académicos”.
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.
Juan Antonio Núñez, coordinator of the Centro de Escritura de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Facultad de Formación del Profesorado y Educación), invited us to give a lecture to the students of theMáster en Formación de Profesorado de ESO y Bachillerato. The talk, entitled “La enseñanza de la escritura mediante herramientas tecnológicas de ayuda a la redacción” was about the use of writing support systems in the classroom, among them, arText.
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.
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! 🙂
The University of Córdoba has invited us to participate in the permanent education seminar entitled “La construcción del conocimiento a través de la investigación en Lingüística y Traductología: métodos, problemas y últimas investigaciones”, organised by José María Castellano Martínez and Sergio Rodríguez Tapia.
Within the framework of this seminar, a conference entitled «La importancia de la metodología en proyectos de investigación sobre herramientas TIC en el ámbito de la lingüística» was given. Thanks to this initiative, it was possible to explain the methodology used in the development of arText to the doctoral students attending the event.
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! 🙂
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).
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 
!
Our colleagues from the Institute of Literature and Language Sciences at the Pontificia Universidad Católica of Valparaíso (Chile) have invited us to give a conference on arText as part of the excellent virtual conference cycle they are organizing, called “Meetings in Linguistics”. Our team would like to thank the organizers of the event, Sabela Fernández (Director of the Master’s Degree in Applied Linguistics) and Romualdo Ibáñez (Director of the PhD programme in Linguistics), for their kind invitation.
Our conference was entitled “The arText system: a technological tool that helps to write texts in specialized fields in Spanish”. It summarized the trajectory of the research project in which arText has been developed, from its beginnings in 2015 to the present day. The methodology used in each of the work phases has been explained, as well as the results obtained in each of the financed projects obtained by the team.
The conference was broadcast via Facebook Live and is still available 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 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! 🙂
