We have created a YouTube channel where we will be uploading audiovisual content related to arText: video tutorials, participation in conferences, events, etc.
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Participation in the IV Jornadas Internacionales de Transversalidad en la Docencia
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.
New publications in the Journal of Language and Law
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.
We’re on the Maldita Twitchería tecnológica
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.
Participation in the round table “PLN para solucionar problemas sociales”
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.
Talk at the Universidade Estadual de Maringá
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.
Participation in the II Jornadas de Lenguaje Jurídico “Rebus Sic Stantibus”
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.
arText claro in the media
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:
Virtual presentation of arText claro
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.
arText and arText claro video tutorial
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 incorporates a new tool for writing texts in plain language
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.
Participation in the Jornada de Proyectos de Investigación del Departamento de Filologías Extranjeras y sus Lingüísticas de la UNED
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:
- “ArText, un proyecto integral de ingeniería lingüística” – Gerardo Sierra
- “Natural Language processing to manage harmful content online” – Maite Taboada
Conference at the Universitat Jaume I
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.
Communication at the XI Jornadas de Investigación en Innovación Docente de la UNED
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:
Communication at enTRetextos 2021
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.
We appear in delaJusticia.com: “Los textos de la Administración bajo la lupa lingüística”
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! 🙂
Talk at the I Seminario “La escritura académica”
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”.
Review in the 169th number of the boletín Punto y Coma of the European Union
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.
Lecture at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
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 book “El discurso del ámbito de la Administración: una perspectiva lingüística” on the Llengua i Dret blog
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.
arText on the Cálamo y Cran blog
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!
arText surpasses 50,000 users
The arText system has exceeded 50,000 users! Many thanks to all of them for keeping the project growing. 🙂
Presentation of the book “El discurso del ámbito de la Administración. Una perspectiva lingüística”, by Iria da Cunha
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.
Infographic: how to use arText in 6 steps
We have designed an infographic explaining how to use the arText system in 6 easy steps.
You can download the interactive PDF here.
New demo about arText
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.
New book on administrative discourse
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/
artext surpasses 45,000 users!
The arText system already has over 45,000 users. Thank you to all of them for making the project grow! 🙂
Conference at the University of Córdoba
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.
arText is mentioned in Archiletras
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! 🙂
arText at the Primera Jornada “Escritura Académica y Discurso Especializado”
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 a Twitter account!
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 
!
Conference about arText at the Pontificia Universidad Católica of Valparaiso
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.
The new arText functionality in the media
In the past few weeks, several media have talked about the new functionality of arText for writing the TFG. Some of them are:
arText on the UNED website and social networks
Talk at the V International Congress on Transparency (CIT 2020)
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.
arText users are already more than 35,000!
The arText system already has more than 35,000 users. The project continues to grow! 🙂
FPI predoctoral contract awarded
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! 🙂
New arText functionality to write the TFG of any field
The article entitled “Una herramienta TIC para la redacción del Trabajo de Fin de Grado (TFG)” has been published in the last issue of the journal ELUA: Estudios de Lingüística. Universidad de Alicante. This journal has the “Sello de calidad revistas científicas españolas de la FECYT“.
The goal of the article is to explain that a new functionality has been enabled in the arText system to help university students in the writing of the Final Degree Project (TFG), in its research work modality, for any field of knowledge.
It is possible to access this functionality from the main page of the arText system by selecting the textual genre “Trabajo de fin de grado (TFG)” within the section “Textos académicos de cualquier ámbito”.
Our team would thank you for the dissemination of this functionality, which is totally free of charge. We are sure that it will be very useful for students who must elaborate their TFG at any Spanish university and in any field of knowledge. In addition, we find it especially useful in this difficult time that we are living, in which making electronic resources available to students is more necessary than ever, in the framework of online learning.
Article reference:
da Cunha, Iria (2020). «Una herramienta TIC para la redacción del Trabajo de Fin de Grado (TFG)». ELUA: Estudios de Lingüística. Universidad de Alicante 34. 39-72.
For the implementation of this new arText functionality, the materials from the following book on the TFG and the TFM have been used, currently recommended in many Spanish universities:
da Cunha, Iria (2016). El trabajo de fin de grado y de máster: Redacción, defensa y publicación. Barcelona: Editorial UOC. ISBN 9788490643907
Paper published in Linguamática
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
arText has more than 20,000 users!
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!
arText in Iberlegal 2019 (PLAN TL)
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.
Paper published in Discourse Studies
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
arText seminar at the University of the Basque Country
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”.
National funded project
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.
I Encuentro de la Red Leonardo
The Leonardo Scholarships were created in 2014 by the Fundación BBVA to promote a key collective in Spain: researchers between 30 and 45 years old in an intermediate stage of their careers. The program held on November 14, 2018, the I Encuentro de la Red Leonardo, which brought together the scholarship recipients of the five calls at the Madrid headquarters of the BBVA Foundation. The President of BBVA and the Fundación BBVA, Francisco González, has presented the diplomas to the winners of the different thematic areas. In the following photo the director of the arText project is collecting the diploma of the area of Humanities:
In this meeting the Red Leonardo was launched, which was born as an instrument that will facilitate the exchange of ideas and contents in the physical space and in the digital domain, through the web www.redleonardo.es. This digital site will also serve to follow the trajectories of the members of the network beyond the project carried out thanks to the Leonardo Scholarship.
The creation of the Red Leonardo has appeared in various media, such as El País, El Mundo, ABC, La Vanguardia and Cadena SER, among others.
Paper published in Revista Signos
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
New book published
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
arText in the Portal del Hispanismo (Instituto Cervantes)
The arText system has been included in the Resources section of the Portal del Hispanismo (Instituto Cervantes).
