We are the Language Interaction Lab at the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
We work at the intersection of Natural Language Processing and Human-Computer Interaction. We design human-centric AI systems that make it easier for more people to communicate, share and understand expert knowledge. This includes evaluating the ability of AI to communicate complex concepts to diverse audiences and building interactive tools that augment how people read, write, and listen in knowledge-intensive fields like medicine, law, and science.
News & Updates
- Jan 2026: We have 6 papers going to CHI 2026 this year! The papers represent the lab’s growing focus on human-centered AI in high-stakes domains like Law, Medicine, and Science. More details about each paper coming soon.
Our Team
Publications
2026
Explain Like I'm 5 or Whatever I Choose: Evaluating the Interactive Potential of Language Model Responses
ArXiv 2026 Preprint
FOXGLOVE: Understanding Goal-Oriented and Anchored Writing Feedback from Experts and LLMs on Argumentative Essays
ArXiv 2026 Preprint
2025
On the Regulatory Potential of User Interfaces for AI Agent Governance
NeurIPS Workshop on Regulatable ML 2025 Workshop
2024
Qlarify: Bridging Scholarly Abstracts and Papers with Recursively Expandable Summaries
UIST 2024
Leveraging Large Language Models for Learning Complex Legal Concepts through Storytelling
ACL 2024
2023
Beyond Summarization: Designing AI Support for Real-World Expository Writing Tasks
In2Writing Workshop 2023 Workshop
Blog Posts
Who Is Personalization Actually For? Re-Centering Humans in LLM Personalization
June 15, 2026 · Lechen Zhang
A blog post about our paper, “Re-Centering Humans in LLM Personalization”
How do you have an AI help you write without writing for you?
April 10, 2026 · Yijun Liu
A common model for AI writing support is straightforward: paste your draft, receive a better one. We noticed this resembles a failure mode that universities dealt with decades ago, specifically in writing centers, places where students will go to receive...
TermSight: Making Service Contracts Approachable
April 8, 2026 · Ziheng (Fred) Huang
We regularly click “Agree” to Terms of Service (ToS) that quietly govern our data and rights, such as when purchasing a ticket online from disney, signing up for reddit, or requesting ride with Uber. Increasingly, the U.S. count considers these...
Living Contracts: Beyond Document-Centric Interaction with Legal Agreements
April 8, 2026 · Ziheng (Fred) Huang
We regularly sign legal contracts for where we live, who we work with, and the services we use. However, our interaction with legal contracts has largely been limited to document reading, an experience often complicated by extended, complex, and ambiguous...
Re-Designing Persona-Driven Deep Research System to Encourage User Critical Thinking
March 31, 2026 · Yiren Liu
Research studies have been increasingly arguing for concerns over reducing critical thinking skills in knowledge workers. In the context of scientific research, the use of deep research systems for tasks like literature review and research ideation are also becoming increasingly...
Better translation won't improve health AI for immigrants. Here's what they actually need.
March 31, 2026 · Michelle Huang
Imagine going to the doctor in a country where you don’t speak the language well. The doctor uses an AI translation app to communicate with you, but maybe you only notice the awkward grammar in the translation. Or worse, you...
Lab Life
