Iria da Cunha from UNED (National Distance Education University) will present a seminar a week today (29th June at 15:00, online) entitled "A writing assistant to adapt administrative texts into plain language" and her system to achieve this, named arText. Dr. da Cunha holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from UPF and is a member of the IULATERM research group here. Please contact us for an access link to the meeting. We hope to see you there!

Talk abstract: Plain language advocates that texts addressed to citizens should be written in simpler and more transparent language, so that they can easily understand the message to be conveyed. In this context, our aim is to develop an assisted writing tool for Spanish to help Public Administration staff to write texts addressed to citizens in plain language. The system is free and online. It integrates different Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to detect the linguistic features that interfere with plain language recommendations in the texts written by users. It also provides users with information to make their text clearer. A manually annotated corpus, and precision and recall measures were used to evaluate the algorithms. The results are very positive, although they also highlight some aspects that could be improved in the future.