Language Interaction Lab

Publications

2026

From Crafting Text to Crafting Thought: Grounding Intelligent Writing Support to Writing Center Pedagogy

Yijun Liu, John Gallagher, Sarah Sterman, Tal August

CHI 2026

Perspectra: Choosing Your Experts Enhances Critical Thinking in Multi-Agent Research Ideation

Yiren Liu, Viraj Shah, Sangho Suh, Pao Siangliulue, Tal August, Yun Huang

CHI 2026

Living Contracts: Beyond Document-Centric Interaction with Legal Agreements

Ziheng Huang, Hari Sundaram, Tal August

CHI 2026

TermSight: Making Service Contracts Approachable

Ziheng Huang, Tal August, Hari Sundaram

CHI 2026

Designing Beyond Language: Sociotechnical Barriers in AI Health Technologies for Limited English Proficiency

Michelle Huang, Violeta J. Rodríguez, Koustuv Saha, Tal August

CHI 2026

Cocoa: Co-Planning and Co-Execution with AI Agents

K. J. Kevin Feng, Kevin Pu, Matt Latzke, Tal August, Pao Siangliulue, Jonathan Bragg, Daniel S. Weld, Amy X. Zhang, Joseph Chee Chang

CHI 2026

Learning User Preferences Through Interaction for Long-Term Collaboration

Shuhaib Mehri, Priyanka Kargupta, Tal August, Dilek Hakkani-Tür

ArXiv 2026 Preprint

2025

Research Borderlands: Analysing Writing Across Research Cultures

Shaily Bhatt, Tal August, Maria Antoniak

ACL 2025

Tree-of-Debate: Multi-Persona Debate Trees Elicit Critical Thinking for Scientific Comparative Analysis

Priyanka Kargupta, Ishika Agarwal, Tal August, Jiawei Han

ACL 2025

Personalized Real-time Jargon Support for Online Meetings

Yifan Song, Wing Yee Au, Hon Yung Wong, Brian P Bailey, Tal August

ArXiv 2025 Preprint

Automatic Detection of Research Values from Scientific Abstracts Across Computer Science Subfields

Hang Jiang, Tal August, Luca Soldaini, Kyle Lo, Maria Antoniak

ArXiv 2025 Preprint

On the Regulatory Potential of User Interfaces for AI Agent Governance

Kevin Feng, Tae Soo Kim, Rock Yuren Pang, Faria Huq, Tal August, Amy X Zhang

NeurIPS Workshop on Regulatable ML 2025 Workshop

Uncertainty in Action: Confidence Elicitation in Embodied Agents

Tianjiao Yu, Vedant Shah, Muntasir Wahed, Kiet A. Nguyen, Adheesh Juvekar, Tal August, Ismini Lourentzou

ArXiv 2025 Preprint

2024

Know Your Audience: The Benefits and Pitfalls of Generating Plain Language Summaries Beyond the "General" Audience

Tal August, Kyle Lo, Noah A. Smith, Katharina Reinecke

CHI 2024

A Design Space for Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants

Mina Lee, Katy Ilonka Gero, John Joon Young Chung, et al. (incl. Tal August)

CHI 2024

Qlarify: Bridging Scholarly Abstracts and Papers with Recursively Expandable Summaries

Raymond Fok, Joseph Chee Chang, Tal August, Amy X Zhang, Daniel S Weld

UIST 2024

Leveraging Large Language Models for Learning Complex Legal Concepts through Storytelling

Hang Jiang, Xiajie Zhang, Robert Mahari, Daniel Kessler, Eric Ma, Tal August, Irene Li, Alex Pentland, Yoon Kim, Jad Kabbara, Deb Roy

ACL 2024

Personalized Jargon Identification for Enhanced Interdisciplinary Communication

Yue Guo, Joseph Chee Chang, Maria Antoniak, Erin Bransom, Trevor Cohen, Lucy Lu Wang, Tal August

NAACL 2024

Evaluating Language Model Math Reasoning via Grounding in Educational Curricula

Li Lucy, Tal August, Rose E. Wang, Luca Soldaini, Courtney Allison, Kyle Lo

EMNLP Findings 2024

APPLS: A Meta-evaluation Testbed for Plain Language Summarization

Yue Guo, Tal August, Gondy Leroy, Trevor Cohen, Lucy Lu Wang

EMNLP 2024

The Semantic Reader Project: Augmenting Scholarly Documents through AI-Powered Interactive Reading Interfaces

Kyle Lo, Joseph Chee Chang, Andrew Head, et al. (incl. Tal August)

Communications of the ACM 2024

2023

Paper Plain: Making Medical Research Papers Approachable to Healthcare Consumers with Natural Language Processing

Tal August, Lucy Lu Wang, Jonathan Bragg, Marti A. Hearst, Andrew Head, Kyle Lo

ACM TOCHI 2023

How Language Formality in Security and Privacy Interfaces Impacts Intended Compliance

Jackson Stokes, Tal August, Robert A Marver, Alexei Czeskis, Franziska Roesner, Tadayoshi Kohno, Katharina Reinecke

CHI 2023

Beyond Summarization: Designing AI Support for Real-World Expository Writing Tasks

Zejiang Shen, Tal August, Pao Siangliulue, Kyle Lo, Jonathan Bragg, Jeff Hammerbacher, Doug Downey, Joseph Chee Chang, David Sontag

In2Writing Workshop 2023 Workshop

2022

Generating Scientific Definitions with Controllable Complexity

Tal August, Katharina Reinecke, Noah A. Smith

ACL 2022

Detecting Urgency in Multilingual Medical SMS in Kenya

Narshion Ngao, Zeyu Wang, Lawrence Nderu, Tobias Mwalili, Tal August, Keshet Ronen

AACL Student Research Workshop 2022 Workshop