Writing

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6 papers in the last 28 days · 0.1% of indexed attention

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Period ending 2026-09-21

1 new paper

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Writing.

Period ending 2026-09-14

1 new paper

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Writing.

Period ending 2026-09-07

2 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Writing.

52 papers

Latest in Writing

Sep 14, 2026cs.HC

PeerPen: AI-Assisted Writing for Online Mental Health Peer Support

Online mental health communities thrive on peer support, yet those who volunteer to help often lack formal training and may struggle to articulate supportive responses. AI co-writing could lower this barrier; however, peer support derives much of its value from being perceived as personal, raising questions around authorship, ownership, and trust. We built PeerPen, a writing assistance tool embedded within a Reddit-like interface, supporting two main features: draft generation and revision of user-written responses. Through semi-structured interviews with 15 participants, we find that PeerPen reduced the burden of composing responses and increased confidence in offering support. Participants wanted AI to assist their writing without taking over authorship and anticipated tensions around authenticity and trust. Such assistance could make authorship uncertain even for responses written without it, weakening trust across the community. We contribute design implications for AI writing assistance that scaffolds supportive communication, preserves authorship, and accounts for community-level trust.
Jiwon Kim, Sherry Gong, Maya Ajit +5
Sep 8, 2026cs.CL

Detecting Authorship in Political Texts with Inductive Stylometry

Political texts are rarely authored by the nominal speaker alone. Tweets, speeches, reports, and official statements are drafted, edited, or harmonized by staff, yet political science has paid limited attention to the stylistic traces these hidden authors leave behind. This paper develops and stress-tests an inductive stylometric approach for recovering latent authorship structure in political communication, combining character 3-gram features with UMAP dimensionality reduction, and Burrows' Delta. We apply the approach to six corpora that vary in length (from tweets to long documents), in mode (written and oral), and in language (English and Hungarian). The approach recovers near-disjoint analyst fingerprints in formal legal prose in both languages, sorts a politician's tweets into validated subsets while uncovering additional insights, and distinguishes scripted from improvised speech. It fails, however, to resolve individual speechwriters within scripted corpora. Frequency-based stylometry is thus a powerful tool that, depending on authorial signal strength and institutional editing, can uncover authorship traces relevant to legislative studies, political communication, and policy research.
Gennadii Iakovlev, Levente Littvay
Sep 2, 2026cs.CL

SWIM: Student Writing Simulation via Proficiency-Conditioned Generation

Writing proficiency manifests in how students develop content, organize ideas, choose words, and use language. Despite growing interest in LLM-based student simulation, whether LLMs can reproduce such multidimensional variation in extended writing remains largely unexplored. In this work, we explore if language models can realistically simulate student writing, and introduce SWIM, a task that formulates Student Writing sIMulation as proficiency-conditioned essay generation. We evaluate prompting, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and reinforcement learning (RL) methods for writing simulation using automated essay scoring as a measure of profile alignment. Extensive experiments reveal that prompting provides limited proficiency control, even for strong proprietary LLMs with rubric-grounded strategies. In particular, while models can adjust content-oriented traits, they struggle to reproduce the lexical, grammatical, and organizational variation in different proficiency levels. SFT substantially improves alignment, while RL with the proposed proficiency-alignment reward yields further gains across all writing traits and essay prompts. Our findings suggest that explicit supervision enables substantially stronger profile alignment than prompting alone, while authentic low-proficiency writing remains challenging to reproduce.
Heejin Do, Jakub Kontak, Mrinmaya Sachan
Sep 1, 2026cs.HC

Designing Proactive Thought Partners for Writing

Writing involves diverse cognitive activities, from ideation to revision, and writers' needs vary across individuals and moments. Proactive AI promises to provide the right support at the right time, yet existing proactive tools largely focus on generic textual assistance, such as autocomplete. This paper studies the design space of proactive thought partners: AI agents that proactively offer customizable, higher-level cognitive support during writing. We instantiated this concept in a technology probe and deployed it with 16 participants for one week. The probe allows users to create partners by configuring their roles and proactivity. As users write, relevant partners take the initiative at appropriate moments to offer suggestions. Our findings show that participants configured proactive support through prospective planning, used suggestions for both idea generation and self-monitoring, and valued lightweight visual representations alongside non-directive rhetorical framing for non-intrusive interventions. We derive implications for designing proactive writing assistants around customization, timing, engagement, and representation.
Chao Zhang, Abe Davis, Chih-Wei Chen +1
Aug 31, 2026cs.HC

Towards Cognitive Process-Aware Proactive Writing Support

Large language models can support writing, but existing tools require users to explicitly articulate prompts-particularly burdensome in creative writing, where intentions are often ambiguous. Proactive support that infers users' needs from writing interactions could alleviate this burden, but raises two challenges: determining what support to provide and when to intervene. This work focuses on the former. We hypothesize that Flower and Hayes' cognitive process theory of writing-which characterizes writing through six cognitive processes-offers an interpretable bridge between observable writing behavior and appropriate support types. Through a formative study and literature review, we identify 14 writing support types associated with these cognitive processes, along with characteristic interaction behaviors linked to each process. We then instantiate this framework in AToM CoWriter, which infers support needs from writing interactions and document context. Two within-subjects studies (N = 21) provide initial evidence that this approach improves expressiveness and idea exploration, and that cognitive process inference increases engagement with proactive suggestions. These findings suggest that cognitive processes can provide a promising basis for support selection in proactive writing systems.
Masahiro Yoshida, Atsuya Kobayashi, Kei Tateno +1
Aug 26, 2026cs.CL

Unfolding Scientific Papers into Multi-Turn Generation Trajectories for Continued Pre-Training

A recent line of synthetic-data work reconstructs the thinking behind existing text rather than rewriting the text itself, but it operates on short web passages, recovers only local thoughts, and leaves the structure of whole documents untouched. Scientific papers are written to a clear and largely uniform structure and make a natural substrate for lifting this paradigm to the document level. We present a pipeline that unfolds each paper into a multi-turn generation trajectory in which a teacher model reconstructs the writing process of the whole paper: a writing request, a global plan, and pre-writing deliberation for each section. All section texts and the abstract are kept verbatim from the source paper. We apply the pipeline to 1.8M quality-filtered arXiv papers and obtain a 60B-token corpus for continued pre-training (CPT) that is roughly twice the source text. The same reverse construction extends to instruction data and evaluation. We build an SFT dataset of 200K samples using answers derived from paper text. We also use held-out papers to construct PAW-Bench, a benchmark of 2,940 academic writing tasks with per-task rubrics and checklists. In controlled experiments, CPT on our corpus followed by SFT on public datasets improves writing performance while preserving general reasoning and improving long document reading. Replacing part of the writing SFT data with our synthetic instruction data further improves performance on PAW-Bench.
Qiankai Xu, Qiguang Chen, Zixin Su +4
Aug 10, 2026cs.HC

VeriForge: Mitigating Latent Knowledge Gaps in Narrative Drafting via Mixed-Initiative Scaffolding

Great fiction earns its verisimilitude through precise details, from how a longsword is gripped to pierce armor gaps to why a bleeding corpse cannot yet smell of decay, weaving domain expertise into the fabric of invented worlds. Current AI writing tools offer limited support for discovering and integrating unfamiliar domain knowledge into narrative. They require explicit queries that authors cannot formulate, generate finished prose that risks homogenizing voice, or assist only within the boundaries of what authors already know. We argue that AI should reveal latent knowledge gaps to writers while preserving their agency to transform discovered knowledge into authentic prose. Grounded in formative interviews with 9 fiction writers, we present VeriForge, a mixed-initiative writing system that divides cognitive labor so that the system assumes initiative over domain discovery while the author retains full initiative over narrative synthesis. VeriForge realizes this through three complementary mechanisms. Proactive inline highlighting flags potential knowledge gaps as authors draft. Dual-stream querying pairs conversational responses with source-anchored Knowledge Cards for direct fact extraction. A spatial Knowledge Canvas allows authors to organize and connect discovered knowledge across their writing. These mechanisms are powered by a graph-based retrieval-augmented generation pipeline grounded in domain-specific source materials. A within-subjects user study (N=12) provides preliminary evidence that this paradigm helps authors recognize previously overlooked knowledge gaps, supports creative exploration, and is perceived by expert raters to produce passages with stronger domain grounding in a controlled cold-start writing task.
Ruqi Sun, Jiaping Li, Wenhui Tao +4
Aug 4, 2026cs.CL

Internalizing Academic Writing Workflows for Introduction Generation via Struct-Aware Policy Learning

Generating a rigorous paper introduction with large language models (LLMs) remains challenging, since it requires coordinating background, gap identification, method and contribution within a coherent narrative. Existing solutions externalize this process as multi-stage prompts or agent workflows which are expensive and vulnerable to cross-stage drift. We propose StructPO, a struct-aware policy learning framework that internalizes the entire multi-stage writing workflow into a single-pass policy controlled by explicit stage tokens. StructPO introduces struct-aware credit assignment to decouple local stage quality from global coherence and refinement-guided optimization to internalize revision behavior into the first-pass policy. Experiments show that StructPO improves semantic alignment, structural rationality and inference efficiency over workflow-based baselines, generalizes to out-of-domain settings, and remains competitive with GPT-5.1 in human evaluation when scaled to Qwen3-32B. These results show that internalizing academic writing workflows through fine-grained policy optimization offers a viable alternative to costly external orchestration.
Meicong Zhang, Tiancheng Su, Jiahao Cheng +3
Aug 2, 2026cs.CL

RH-RAG: Trustworthy Long-Form Generation for Privacy-Constrained Settings

Generating long-form content from extensive internal reports remains challenging for organizations operating under strict privacy and security constraints, where proprietary cloud-based LLM APIs are often not viable. While locally deployed open-weight models offer a privacy-preserving alternative, existing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches on smaller models frequently lack effective global planning and accumulate factual inconsistencies over long outputs. To address these limitations, we present RH-RAG, a multi-agent framework for secure and trustworthy long form generation using local language models. RH-RAG decomposes generation into three coordinated stages: a Planner Agent that constructs a global document outline from high-level semantic summaries, a Writer Agent that incrementally generates coherent section-wise content using bounded coherence memory, and a Checker Agent that mitigates hallucinations through natural language inference-based factual verification and an attestation-driven revision loop. The framework further employs a dual-level retrieval index that supports efficient planning and fine-grained contextual generation on consumer-grade hardware. Evaluations across literary, financial, and legal domains demonstrate that RH-RAG consistently improves factual grounding, semantic coherence, and document-level alignment compared to standard and hierarchical RAG baselines, while achieving reliability competitive with proprietary cloud-based systems without compromising data privacy.
Raj Shekhar Singh
Jul 30, 2026cs.CL

Generative AI and linguistic diversity in academic writing and publishing: Perspectives from World Englishes

The rise of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in academic writing and publishing (AWP) raises questions about linguistic inclusivity and the legitimacy of diverse Englishes in global scholarly communication. This article responds to these questions through a structured scholarly dialogue involving five sociolinguists from World Englishes and adjacent fields. Organised around five guiding questions, the dialogue interrogates how GenAI tools influence writing practices, reinforce or disrupt dominant language norms, and raise ethical challenges. Contributors reflect on the potential of GenAI to democratise writing processes while also raising concerns about GenAI's tendency to marginalise minoritised varieties and flatten nuance in scholarly writing. Across the dialogue, themes of linguistic (in)justice, researcher agency, and institutional responsibility emerge, with contributors calling for equity-informed policies, critical AI literacy, and inclusive co-design in GenAI development. The article shows the value of dialogic reflection in understanding GenAI's role in AWP. It concludes that while GenAI may reinforce existing hierarchies, it can also serve as a site of resistance, depending on how it is designed, governed and used within scholarly communities committed to linguistic diversity.
Kingsley Ugwuanyi, Christian Mair, Sender Dovchin +3
Jul 30, 2026cs.CL

ICLE++: Modeling Fine-Grained Traits for Holistic Essay Scoring

The majority of the recently-developed models for automated essay scoring (AES) are evaluated solely on the ASAP corpus. However, ASAP is not without its limitations. For instance, it is not clear whether models trained on ASAP can generalize well when evaluated on other corpora. In light of these limitations, we introduce ICLE++, a corpus of persuasive student essays annotated with both holistic scores and trait-specific scores. Not only can ICLE++ be used to test the generalizability of AES models trained on ASAP, but it can also facilitate the evaluation of models developed for newer AES problems such as multi-trait scoring and cross-prompt scoring. We believe that ICLE++, which represents a culmination of our long-term effort in annotating the essays in the ICLE corpus, contributes to the set of much-needed annotated corpora for AES research.
Shengjie Li, Vincent Ng
Jul 29, 2026cs.HC

Human diversity fuels collective creativity that large language models cannot simulate or sustain

Diverse human groups produce diverse ideas, the raw material of innovation. Generative AI challenges this engine twice over: everyday AI assistance may homogenize what diverse people create, and AI-simulated diversity may replace the people altogether. We tested both challenges in a preregistered creative metaphor experiment with native (L1) and non-native (L2) English writers, who wrote without AI, with AI-generated ideas (AI ideation), or with AI refining their own ideas (AI refinement). L2 writers contributed more collective diversity than L1 writers, with native-language ideation showing the most diverse pools. AI ideation compressed collective diversity for everyone and left the L2 advantage undetectable, whereas AI refinement preserved both. We then simulated the entire writer pool using personas built from participants' real backgrounds, three model families, native-language prompting, and elevated sampling temperatures. Every simulated pool fell below every human pool, and pushing models further induced diversity only through degenerate text. However, at the individual level, AI ideation raised writers' ratings, pitting private incentives against the collective good, except when L2 writers used their native language, which benefited both. Human diversity remains a valuable creative resource that current AI cannot simulate or sustain; the design of human-AI collaborative workflows determines whether it survives.
Mengchen Dong, Hiromu Yakura
Jul 23, 2026cs.CL

Humanly: A Configurable and Traceable Environment for Human-AI Collaborative Writing

Teachers, conference chairs, and public readers all judge writing from limited evidence, seeing only a finished document and not the process that produced it. Final text alone cannot reveal whether a document was produced through human typing, AI generation, or mixed human-AI collaboration. Existing process-tracking tools help, but many are tied to host-document histories, provide coarse activity records, and offer limited control over the writing environment. Humanly is a writing platform that makes the writing process itself the evidence. Users configure writing environments for personal documents or assigned tasks and draft in a workspace that records writing activity and in-platform AI assistance. Humanly can package a completed session into a sealed writing certificate with configuration-aware anomaly behavior review. It can support writing scenarios such as course assignments, peer review, and personal certification. Our user study shows that Humanly is helpful across roles, and a red-teaming study shows that the Humanly Typing Detector distinguishes human hand typing from automated typing.
Shenzhe Zhu, Haoqian Zhang, Xu Yang +7
Jul 23, 2026cs.AI

Naju: A Native Discrete State-Space Model with Independent Retention and Writing for Long-Sequence Memory

Long-sequence memory tracking places two opposing demands on a recurrent state: near-lossless retention of stored bindings over long horizons, and active overwriting of stale ones. In our diagnostic suite, the strongest efficient baselines tend to solve only one side well. Continuous-time-parameterized state-space models (SSMs) such as Mamba obtain their discrete recurrence by zero-order-hold discretization of a continuous-time system; we argue that this detour is unnecessary for memory tracking and parameterize the discrete transition directly. Naju (Native Adaptive Junction Unit) factorizes the recurrent update, schematically xn=fnxn1+in(Bnun)x_n = f_n\odot x_{n-1} + i_n\odot(B_n u_n), into an explicit discrete pole (a learned forget gate fnf_n), an independent write gain ini_n, and input-dependent write/read maps. Since the sigmoid pole satisfies 0<fn<10<f_n<1, each frozen local coordinate is Schur-stable by construction, and the full time-varying recurrence satisfies a fading-memory/BIBO bound under uniform boundedness assumptions, with no stability regularizer. We formalize the key structural limitation of coupled designs: any non-expansive complementary single-gate recurrence ties the effective retention rr and write gain ww through r+w1|r|+w\le 1, so near-complete retention forces weak writing; decoupling fnf_n from ini_n removes this constraint. Empirically, Naju is the only evaluated model that remains strong on both retention and overwriting at 4x the training length. Beyond the diagnostic suite, we evaluate Naju on WikiText-103 language modeling, Long Range Arena, and multi-query associative recall. Across these settings, Naju consistently combines strong long-range memory with competitive or superior performance, outperforming the Mamba baselines in the principal comparisons while remaining competitive with the Transformer and preserving linear-time, linear-memory scaling.
Hyuk Lim, Seunghyun Yoon
Jul 19, 2026cs.CL

Literary Non-Style in LLM-Generated Text

Prior work on LLM-generated text has demonstrated quantitative and qualitative departures from text produced by humans. LLM-generated texts differ from human writing in style, resulting in a characteristic textual "feel," while the semantic range of LLMs is much restricted compared to that of humans. In this contribution, I note simple but consistent patterns in the statistical distribution of n-grams within LLM-generated text. Via qualitative analysis of these n-grams, I reveal deficiencies in LLM style. Because higher-order n-grams correlate to semantic content, I conclude that questions of style and semantics are not cleanly separable.
Cory Massaro
Jul 16, 2026cs.CL

Investigating first-language bias in LLM-based automated essay scoring: A cross-prompt evaluation of an open-weight AI-model on TOEFL essays

This study examines the cross-prompt generalization and first-language (L1) scoring effects of a LoRA-adapted open-weight large language model (Gemma-3-27B-it) applied to automated essay scoring. Using the identical model and inference configuration reported in "AiAWE: An Open-Source LLM Automated Writing Evaluation System Using LoRA-Adapted Instruction-Tuned Models" (Gayed, 2026), which was fine-tuned on 480 argumentative essays from two prompts, we evaluate scoring accuracy on the full TOEFL11 corpus: 12,100 essays written by test-takers from 11 first-language backgrounds across eight prompts, none of which were seen during training. The model's raw scores (0.5-5.0) are mapped to the same three proficiency bands (low, medium, high) used by ETS, enabling direct comparison. The model achieved an overall band agreement of 77.79% and a quadratic weighted kappa of 0.702, with adjacent-band agreement of 99.98%. Accuracy was stable across all eight unseen prompts, with no advantage for prompts thematically related to the training data, indicating robust cross-prompt generalization. However, the model exhibited a systematic, L1-linked scoring offset. Within every proficiency band, essays from European-language backgrounds received consistently higher scores than essays from East-Asian-language backgrounds, a pattern not attributable to the composition of the fine-tuning data. This is the first large-scale L1 fairness analysis of a fine-tuned open-weight LLM for automated essay scoring.
John Maurice Gayed
Jul 16, 2026cs.CL

How Well Does AI-Generated Feedback Work? Intrinsic and Extrinsic Evaluation across more than 20,000 EFL Essay Drafts

This study examines feedback in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing contexts, focusing on written corrective feedback (WCF). Large language models (LLMs) can provide WCF at scale, but aligning them with pedagogical best practices remains an ongoing challenge. WCF meeting criteria like factuality or relevance may still be unsuitable for learning contexts, highlighting the need for extrinsic evaluation based on the learner's perspective. We deployed WCF systems in a university-level EFL class with nearly 2,000 students, collecting over 20,000 drafts. We evaluated the generated WCF from two perspectives: intrinsic evaluation by experienced English teachers using a rubric, and extrinsic evaluation via student feedback and engagement metrics. Results revealed low alignment between teacher expert ratings and student feedback. These findings suggest that traditional expert evaluation alone may not fully capture WCF's usability or helpfulness from the learner's perspective, highlighting the importance of learner-centered evaluation frameworks for AI-based applications in language education.
Steven Coyne, Diana Galvan-Sosa, Ryan Spring +4
Jul 16, 2026cs.AI

WrAFT: a Modularized Automated Writing Evaluation System for Argumentative Essays

This study presents WrAFT, a Writing Assessment and Feedback Tool, that delivers both accurate and reliable scores and effective comprehensive feedback to argumentative essays. WrAFT adopts a modular design by dividing automated writing evaluation (AWE) tasks into scoring, surface-level feedback, and deep-level feedback. In building the system, various Large Language Models (LLMs) have been evaluated, including LLaMA-3.3-70B-Instruct, GPT-4o, and Claude 3.7, through both direct prompting and supervised fine-tuning approaches. A proprietary dataset of 480 TOEFL Independent Writing essays with official benchmark scores was utilized. Benchmark-based evaluation shows that WrAFT achieves state-of-the-art performance in scoring, with a quadratic weighted kappa (QWK) of 0.84 and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.44 against official scores on a scale of 0-5. Human evaluation of system-generated feedback also reveals high approval ratings: 96.14 percent for surface-level feedback, 93.03 percent for deep-level macro feedback, and 94.69 percent for deep-level micro feedback. An interactive user interface has been developed for the system and is publicly available and free to use.
Adnan Labib, Yixuan Huang, Jiahui Wu +3
Jul 15, 2026cs.AI

Measuring How Students Rely on Generative AI in Academic Writing: Development and Multi-Source Validation of the Generative AI Reliance Types Scale (GenAI-RTS)

As generative AI (GenAI) becomes increasingly embedded in undergraduate academic writing, how students rely on these tools, rather than simply whether they use them, has become a central question for learning, academic integrity, and educational equity. Existing measures of reliance were developed inductively, focused on discrete problem-solving tasks, and validated mainly with homogeneous samples. This study developed and validated the GenAI Reliance Types Scale (GenAI-RTS), a 20-item instrument measuring four theoretically derived types of GenAI reliance: Strategic, Instrumental, Dependent, and Dialogic. Validation followed the multisource framework of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, drawing on a survey of 382 undergraduates at a U.S. Minority-Serving Institution and interviews with 14 purposively sampled students. Confirmatory factor analyses of six competing models supported a five-factor structure in which Strategic Reliance comprises two facets, Deliberate Use and Critical Evaluation, alongside Instrumental, Dependent, and Dialogic factors (CFI = .92, RMSEA = .08; DWLS CFI = .98, RMSEA = .07). Subscale reliability was acceptable to good (omega = .75-.88), and scalar measurement invariance held across gender, first-generation status, and STEM/non-STEM majors, to our knowledge the first such evidence for a GenAI reliance instrument. Rasch analysis indicated that a five-point response format would improve category functioning. Strategic reliance was positively associated with AI literacy, and the reliance types differentiated students across multiple writing process and outcome variables. The GenAI-RTS offers researchers and educators a theoretically grounded, psychometrically validated instrument for identifying undergraduate reliance profiles and supporting research, assessment, and AI literacy intervention.
Shahin Hossain, Tukhbita Afroz Nawmi
Jul 15, 2026cs.CV

Multi-Expert Routing for Multi-Domain Low-Resource OCR: A Manchu Case Study

Historical Manchu OCR must accommodate various visually distinct writing styles, including regular script, running script, and the semi-cursive chancery hand used in palace memorials, despite limited labeled data. We study a multi-expert system that reuses checkpoints from an iterative fine-tuning process as domain specialists and uses a lightweight page-level image classifier to dispatch pages by visual style. When the checkpoint pool lacks a suitable specialist, we train an additional expert for that domain. On three frozen test sets, the routed system matches the selected specialist for each style at two-decimal precision: 0.30 percent CER on regular script, 1.57 percent on memorials, and 4.83 percent on running script. The router achieves 99.3 percent page-level domain accuracy and matches the domain-label oracle at the same precision. Two of the three selected specialists were not trained specifically for their final domain; only the running-script expert was trained with that domain as its target. We report the evaluation protocol, router design, and per-page predictions to make the comparison reproducible.
Zhan Chen, Jiqiao Ma, Chih-wen Kuo
Jun 30, 2026cs.CL

SEFORA: Student Essays with Feedback Corpus and LLM Feedback Evaluation Framework

Effective writing feedback is among the strongest drivers of student learning, yet producing it at scale is labor-intensive. LLMs offer a natural path to scaling writing support, but two gaps stand in the way: few public corpora capture how instructors actually deliver feedback in real classrooms, and no reliable method measures whether generated feedback aligns with what an instructor would write. We address both. SEFORA is a public corpus pairing instructor inline feedback with assignment prompts, rubrics, scores, and multi-draft revisions across various college writing genres, comprising 564 drafts and 8,240 instructor annotations. UniMatch is a reference-based evaluation framework for open-ended generation: it segments feedback into feedback units, scores their semantic correspondence under instructor-derived criteria, and aligns them via optimal matching to yield interpretable precision, recall, and F1. Across 74 experimental configurations spanning multiple LLMs, no setting exceeds 0.4 F1. UniMatch reveals that models struggle to identify the feedback instructors would prioritize, and performance degrades as models generate more.
Shayan Peyghambari Oskoui, Norah Almousa, Zhaoyi Joey Hou +5
Jun 27, 2026cs.CY

Four Types of LLM Reliance and Their Predictors Among Undergraduate Writers: A Mixed-Methods Study at a Minority-Serving R1 University

Although most undergraduates now use large language models (LLMs), a form of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) for academic writing, no validated method distinguishes the qualitatively different ways students rely on them. Existing instruments assess reliance solely by frequency of use, a measure that, as this study shows, inadvertently rewards dependence on AI rather than recognizing students' own intellectual contribution. Conducted at a public minority-serving university and grounded in the AI Literacy Framework, Expectancy-Value Theory, and Biggs's Presage-Process-Product model, the study drew on 382 undergraduates, 14 interviews, and 396 open-ended survey responses. Four distinct reliance types were identified and confirmed: Strategic (34.3%), Instrumental (30.9%), Dialogic (30.4%), and Dependent (4.5%). Students' value and cost beliefs predicted the intensity of their reliance on LLMs, whereas their AI literacy predicted the type of reliance they adopted, indicating that differentiated support is needed. Notably, Strategic users, those who engaged AI most deliberately, scored lowest on standard outcome measures. This pattern reflects a limitation of current instruments, which index AI's contribution rather than writing quality, thereby penalizing students who show the greatest independent thinking. Analysis also revealed an additional group, roughly 13%, who declined to use AI for ethical rather than practical reasons, and who existing frameworks overlook. These findings carry implications for AI literacy programs, the measurement of student learning outcomes, and equitable AI policy at minority-serving institutions.
Shahin Hossain
Jun 8, 2026cs.AI

MASS: Deep Research for Social Sciences with Memory-Augmented Social Simulation

Deep Research agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited extraordinary potential in automated paper writing tasks. However, existing systems rely heavily on literature retrieval and synthesis through internet and local knowledge bases, often resulting research in lacking insight and creativity in social science. To address this issue, we propose "Memory-Augmented Social Simulation (MASS)", an innovative paradigm that leverages highly realistic and research-oriented social simulations to enhance the creativity and empirical founding of LLMs-generated research. Specifically, MASS integrates three core components: dynamic goal-path planning with multi-level social norm restraint to guide the simulation, a multi-disciplinary behavior dataset for agent memory cold-start, and a structured forgetting mechanism inspired by the Ebbinghaus curve. Together, these ensure simulation authenticity and provide a robust empirical foundation for generating innovative scholarly papers. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, showing a 6.81% improvement in generation overall quality over foundation LLMs and 17.19% gain in Insight over strong baselines.
Yongrui Liu, Deyi Xiong
Jun 4, 2026cs.CL

Interpreting Style Representations via Style-Eliciting Prompts

Style representation learning is a powerful tool for authorship analysis and modeling writing style, yet the latent nature of learned representations makes them difficult to interpret. Recent work has attempted to explain these representations by generating natural language descriptions with large language models (LLMs) conditioned on input text. However, such descriptions are often prone to the LLM's biases and hallucinations, and they lack an explicit objective and practical utility. In this work, we propose a novel framework for interpreting style representations through style-eliciting prompts: natural language instructions designed to steer LLMs to generate text that reflects specific stylistic attributes. We curate 1,010 distinct style features spanning 26 stylistic categories and construct a dataset by prompting an LLM to generate text conditioned on these features. Using this data, we train a decoder to generate a style prompt from the style representation of the generated text. We evaluate our approach on three tasks: (1) recovering original style prompts from generated text, (2) generating text in the same style using the recovered prompts, and (3) steering LLM outputs to match the style of human-written texts. Experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines that directly prompt LLMs with target text, achieving superior performance in both style description and style imitation. These results highlight that style-eliciting prompts can provide a practical and interpretable interface to stylistic information encoded in style representations.
Junghwan Kim, David Jurgens
May 30, 2026cs.DL

RWGBench: Evaluating Scholarly Positioning in Related Work Generation

Large language models have shown strong fluency in scientific writing, yet the evaluation of related work generation (RWG) remains limited. Existing RWG evaluations largely inherit summarization-oriented metrics, using lexical or semantic similarity to reference sections as proxies for quality. However, related work writing is fundamentally a citation-level scholarly positioning task: it requires selecting, organizing, and framing prior work to clarify how a target paper relates to, differs from, and contributes beyond existing research.As a result, models may generate coherent and semantically-relevant text while exhibiting academically critical failures, such as inappropriate citation selection or misplaced references, that conventional metrics do not capture.To this end, we introduce \textbf{RWGBench}, a benchmark that evaluates RWG from the perspective of citation decision-making rather than text similarity. RWGBench is constructed from a large-scale collection of 40,108 computer science papers and a retrieval corpus of 1.09 million documents, with a carefully curated test set comprising 100 papers and their corresponding published related work sections.We propose a multi-dimensional evaluation framework that assesses citation selection, contextual appropriateness, organization, and discourse structure.Experiments reveal systematic limitations in current systems that are obscured by standard evaluations, while Oracle studies further disentangle retrieval-level and generation-level bottlenecks. Human evaluation further shows that our citation-centric metrics align substantially better with expert judgment than surface-level text metrics. RWGBench offers a citation-centric testbed for developing and evaluating related work generation systems that are better aligned with scholarly writing practices.
Anzhe Xie, Weihang Su, Jiaxin Mao +4
May 29, 2026cs.CL

Effects of Varying LLM Access on Essay Writing Behavior

Investigating the degree to which large language models (LLMs) affect teaching and learning in universities can help identify strategies for integrating LLMs in a way that supports, rather than undermines, student learning outcomes. This study examined how varying levels of LLM assistance affect writing performance, engagement, and perceived authorship. We report a pilot study in which 24 college students were randomly assigned to write a short essay with no LLM access, limited access (<=3 prompts, responses capped at 100 words), or unlimited access. Overall essay quality was statistically indistinguishable across groups. Yet writing behavior and perceived authorship diverged sharply: students with limited access reported higher ownership (62.5% would submit the essay as independent work, vs. 25% in the unlimited group), stronger organizational gains, and more strategic, revision-focused prompting. The unlimited group spent more time writing, produced essays more similar to LLM output, and reported reduced creative expression. Our findings suggest that constraining, rather than banning, LLM access may preserve authorship confidence while retaining the scaffolding benefits of AI assistance.
Julia Christenson, Karin de Langis, Shirley Anugrah Hayati +1
May 26, 2026cs.CL

KZ-SafetyPrompts: A Kazakh Safety Evaluation Prompt Dataset for Large Language Models

Kazakh is underrepresented in resources for evaluating the safety behavior of large language models. We present KZ-SafetyPrompts, a Kazakh prompt dataset for safety evaluation across eleven categories covering common risk areas such as self-harm, violence, child exploitation, sexual content, racist content, radicalization, and regulated goods or illegal activities. The dataset contains 5,717 prompts written natively in Kazakh (Cyrillic), organized by category, with English translations for cross-lingual analysis. Prompts resemble realistic user queries, often in a teen or child style, and are phrased as intent prompts without procedural instructions. We document the writing protocol, labeling procedures (including borderline-case decision rules), and quality-control steps (schema standardization, completeness checks, and deduplication). We also align the categories with widely used safety taxonomies to support integration with existing evaluation pipelines. Baseline results with GPT-4o show an overall refusal rate of 28.2%, varying from 5.5% to 53.8% across categories, indicating that Kazakh prompts expose category-specific safety gaps not captured by English-only evaluation.
Wajdi Zaghouani, Shimaa Amer Ibrahim, Aruzhan Muratbek +2
May 26, 2026cs.CL

AI evaluation may bias perceptions: The importance of context in interpreting academic writing

This paper examines how estimates of AI use in scientific writing can be biased when evaluation methods ignore contextual differences across countries and fields. Using large-scale data on journal publications from Dimensions, we construct AI-likeness benchmarks based on differences between human-written and LLM-rephrased abstracts. We show that a pooled benchmark may confound pre-existing stylistic variation with AI-generated text, producing substantial distortions across country-field groups even in pre-LLM publications. In contrast, country-field-specific benchmarks attenuate such distortions and provide a more credible baseline for comparison. Applying these methods to publications in 2025 reveals that the pooled benchmark systematically overestimates AI use in certain countries and fields while underestimating it in others. These findings highlight the importance of context-aware measurement for accurate and equitable evaluation of AI use in science.
Shang Wu, Randol Yao
May 25, 2026cs.CL

Function-Vector Heads Are Two Populations: Writers and Cancellers in In-Context Learning

Function-vector (FV) heads are identified by the magnitude of their causal contribution to in-context rule tasks, and the resulting top set is treated as a single functional class. We show this hides a sign structure. Under a sign-preserving criterion (refined direct logit attribution, validated head by head with path patching) the FV population splits into two opposing groups: writers push the rule-correct logit up, cancellers push it down, and ablating both together moves the readout less than the sum of the two. The split is causal and reproducible. It holds in all but two of the fifteen (model, task) cells we test, spanning three architectures and six Pythia scales, and a sign-shuffle null rejects the single-class account in all but one of the six main cells. It is also invisible to magnitude-only ranking, which surfaces whichever group locally dominates and misses the other, so any function vector or ablation built that way silently averages a promoting and a suppressing mechanism. Cancellers are not attention sinks, induction heads, or copy-suppression heads, and their causal effect is larger than that of magnitude-matched non-FV controls. Zero-ablating them recovers +0.13+0.13 to +0.29+0.29 nats on the correct label in every main cell, and shifts accuracy by +2+2 to +7+7 pp in the same direction.
Han-yu Wang
May 25, 2026cs.CL

AI-Associated Lexical Shifts Across 34 Languages: Cross-Lingual Convergence and Diachronic Uptake in News Writing

AI-associated lexical shifts have been documented mainly in Scientific English. We extend this work to 34 languages in the WMT News Crawl corpus, refining a split-halves continuation diagnostic that compares GPT-4.1 continuations with matched human gold-standard text. For each language, we derive ranked AI-overused lemmas using log prevalence ratios. We find substantial cross-lingual semantic convergence: semantically related concepts recur across typologically diverse languages, with 'emphasize'-type verbs appearing in 24 of 34 languages. Embedding-based and manual analyses support this pattern. We also examine diachronic uptake in news writing before and after ChatGPT's release. Tracking each language's top 20 AI-overused items, we find prevalence increases in 26 of 34 languages from 2020-2021 to 2023-2024, with a mean change of +15.1%, whilst matched baseline words show no comparable increase (-4.5%). In 10 languages with longer historical coverage, longitudinal analyses show post-2022 increases that exceed the modest shifts observed in earlier periods, though with smaller effect sizes than in Scientific English. We validate our approach extensively, including across seeds, model variants, data sizes, model families, and more. Our findings are consistent with the view that AI-associated lexical preferences extend beyond English and may exert cross-lingual homogenising pressure on global language use.
Thomas Stephan Juzek
May 21, 2026cs.CL

Assisted Counterspeech Writing at the Crossroads of Hate Speech and Misinformation

Hate speech and misinformation frequently co-occur online, amplifying prejudice and polarization. Given their scale, using Large Language Models (LLMs) to assist expert counterspeech (CS) writing has gained interest, yet prior work has addressed these phenomena separately. We bridge this gap by studying CS generation in contexts where both hate and misinformation co-occur. We test three knowledge-driven generation strategies: first we prompt an LLM with fact-checkers' guidelines and fact-checking articles; secondly, with NGOs' guidelines and reports; thirdly, we create a mixed strategy that combines guidelines and documents from both. 23 experts revise the generated CS, which are assessed via human and automatic metrics. While LLMs produce adequate CS in 40% of cases, expert edits substantially improve naturalness, exhaustiveness, and adherence to guidelines. Based on the post-edited CS, the mixed strategy proves to be the most effective in crowdsourcing evaluation, pairing strong factual correction with stereotype mitigation and empathetic engagement. We release a dataset of hateful and misinformed claims with expert-verified CS and supporting knowledge.
Genoveffa Martone, Helena Bonaldi, Marco Guerini
May 19, 2026cs.CL

What Are LLMs Doing to Scientific Communication? Measuring Changes in Writing Practices and Reading Experience

Has the style of scientific communication changed due to the growing use of large language models in the writing process? We address this question in the domain of Natural Language Processing by leveraging two data resources we create: a naturalistic corpus of over 37,000 papers from the ACL Anthology (2020-2024); and a synthetic dataset of 3,000 human-written passages and their LLM-generated improvements. We first implement a series of diachronic lexical analyses, showing that both word frequency and usage contexts have changed significantly over time, indicating semantic specialization in some cases and generalization in others. Broadening our perspective, we then model a range of more complex stylistic features and find that LLM-modified texts more frequently contain certain syntactic constructions, more complex and longer words and a lower lexical diversity. Finally, we connect these changes in writing practices to subjective reading experience through a pilot annotation study with 20 domain experts. They overall rate LLM-improved texts as more understandable and exciting, but also express negative qualitative attitudes towards LLMs, highlighting the strongly subjective effect of AI-assisted writing on reading experience.
Filip Miletić, Neele Falk
May 14, 2026cs.HC

Self-Regulated Learning in Essay Writing: Consistency of Strategies and Impact on Outcomes

Background: Abilities for effective self-regulated learning (SRL) are critical for lifelong learning, particularly during adolescence when these skills consolidate and strongly influence future learning. Their importance has grown with the rise of online and blended education. Yet, little is known about how secondary school students self-regulate in online environments, how their SRL processes and strategies evolve, or how they affect outcomes. In secondary education, understanding these processes can reveal patterns and indicators of learning success, informing the design of online support mechanisms. Evidence from repeated-measures designs remains scarce. Objectives: This study aims to examine how secondary school students enact SRL strategies during online essay writing, how these strategies change over time, and how they relate to learning outcomes. Methods: We analysed metacognition-related trace data collected from secondary students during a two-wave online essay-writing task conducted one week apart in two Colombian schools (N = 93 for session 1, N = 95 for session 2) via a digital learning platform. Using a combination of process mining and unsupervised machine learning techniques, we identified dominant SRL strategies grounded in established SRL processes and examined their stability and association with learning outcomes. Results and conclusions: Three dominant SRL strategies were identified. Results showed variability: many students remained in or shifted to Read first, write next, while none used Write intensively, read selectively in session 2. Although less common, latter strategy was positively associated with learning outcomes.
Gloria Fernández-Nieto, Kiyoshige Garcés, Mladen Raković +4
May 11, 2026cs.CL

Measuring Embedding Sensitivity to Authorial Style in French: Comparing Literary Texts with Language Model Rewritings

Large language models (LLMs) can convincingly imitate human writing styles, yet it remains unclear how much stylistic information is encoded in embeddings from any language model and retained after LLM rewriting. We investigate these questions in French, using a controlled literary dataset to quantify the effect of stylistic variation via changes in embedding dispersion. We observe that embeddings reliably capture authorial stylistic features and that these signals persist after rewriting, while also exhibiting LLM-specific patterns. These analytical results offer promising directions for authorship imitation detection in the era of language models.
Benjamin Icard, Lila Sainero, Alice Breton +2
May 5, 2026cs.CL

Not All That Is Fluent Is Factual: Investigating Hallucinations of Large Language Models in Academic Writing

Large Language models (LLMs) show extraordinary abilities, but they are still prone to hallucinations, especially when we use them for generating Academic content. We have investigated four popular LLMs, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, and Copilot for hallucinations specifically for academic writing. We have designed 80 prompts across four categories, namely, reference generation, factual explanation, abstract generation, and writing improvement. We evaluated the model using a 0-5 rubric score, which checks factual accuracy, reference validity, coherence, style consistency, and academic tone. A novel weighted metric, Hallucination Index (HI), was introduced to measure hallucination in the responses generated by the models. Some of the most widely used evaluation metrics often fail to check errors which alter sentiment in machine-translated text. We found that Grok and Copilot perform better on reference generation tasks, but they often struggle with abstract or stylistic prompts, with HI values of 0.67 and 0.70, respectively. Whereas, Gemini and ChatGPT have done well with having stronger tone control, but they lack in writing factual tasks and higher hallucination risk with HI scores of 0.53 and 0.57, respectively. Our study found that hallucination behavior does not depend solely on model architecture but also on the type of task and the prompting conditions we are providing. We propose that our work opens new research dimensions for future researchers.
Humam Khan, Md Tabrez Nafis, Shahab Saquib Sohail +2
May 5, 2026cs.CL

Controllable Narrative Rendering for Enhanced Assisted Writing

Despite the remarkable proficiency of large language models (LLMs) in basic writing assistance, their utility in creative writing is fundamentally hindered by a persistent binary failure. This issue manifests as an oscillation between safe, surface-level editing, referred to as remedial polishing, and destructive, uncontrolled plot expansion. This dilemma defines a critical trade-off between narrative fidelity and descriptive intensity. We propose Loom, an assisted writing framework grounded in the narratological distinction between story and discourse. Loom employs a three-layer pipeline that operationalizes an intent-centered semiotic chain-of-thought to enforce precise control over narrative intent and rendering density. This architecture separates the generation of perceptual material from syntactic insertion, ensuring that enhancement occurs without violating the original event structure. Our comprehensive evaluation, which includes LLM-based metrics and human assessment, demonstrates that Loom successfully resolves this fundamental tension. Loom achieves the highest overall quality score, yielding substantial gains in factual integrity and descriptive intensity compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
Mingzhe Lu, Yanbing Liu, Jiayue Wu +5
Apr 30, 2026cs.CL

Assert, don't describe: Linguistic features that shift LLM reasoning about animal welfare

Animal-welfare advocates produce a lot of writing, and increasingly that writing trains the language models that millions of people then ask about animal welfare. Using vocabulary-matched stance-contrast probes on a held-out animal-welfare benchmark, we measure how each of ten linguistic features changes Llama-3.2-1B's preference for pro-animal-welfare reasoning when used as fine-tuning data. Eight of the ten features produce statistically significant shifts. Seven move the model toward stronger pro-animal-welfare reasoning: assertive certainty, explicit moral vocabulary, emotion words, evaluative claims, narrative structure, depicted harm severity, and immediate temporal framing. Two move it the other way: hedged language and concrete sensory description both dilute the pro-animal-welfare stance. First-person perspective has no statistically significant effect. The practical recommendation for anyone writing animal-welfare text that may end up in LLM training corpora: assert a position rather than describe a scene neutrally. The features that shift the model are the ones that make the writer's position explicit; the features that dilute it hold animal-welfare content but withhold stance.
Jasmine Brazilek, Harper Dunn
Apr 30, 2026cs.CY

The Digital Afterlife of Empires: Four Language Models Converge on the Same Imperial Cartography of Writing

Large language models process the world's writing systems with radical inequality. We constructed the Digital Script Representation Index (DSRI), a seven-axis measure of digital support, and applied it to the 300 writing systems of the Global Script Database (Fukui, 2026). Only 29 scripts (9.7%) are fully supported by contemporary digital infrastructure; among 158 living scripts, 60 (38.0%) lack complete support. Tokenizer efficiency varies by a factor of 31.7 across 45 scripts measured with parallel text. A serial mediation model -- imperial intervention to speaker population to web corpus to tokenizer efficiency -- is consistent with full mediation, with the direct effect of empire indistinguishable from zero (beta = -0.22, p = 0.39) and structural equation model fit indices indistinguishable from saturation at n = 45; the bias-corrected bootstrap CI grazes zero, and we treat the mediation as suggestive rather than confirmatory. Across four independent LLM families (Claude, GPT-4o, Grok, DeepSeek; 12,000 API calls), base-rate-deviation error patterns converge at Spearman rho = 0.85-0.98 (all p < 0.002). 172 script-feature items are answered identically wrong by all four models; over-attribution outnumbers under-recognition 3.9:1, and "used for religion" alone concentrates 43.6% of convergent errors (enrichment 4.1x). With religion excluded as a sensitivity check, the cross-architecture convergence is preserved (mean rho = 0.87 on nine features) and the over-attribution asymmetry persists at 1.77:1 (n = 97, binomial p = 0.008), indicating multi-channeled rather than single-channeled bias. The findings are consistent with an interpretation in which the structural inequalities historical empires inflicted on script communities persist in contemporary language models through the shared training corpus rather than through any individual model's design choices.
Hiroki Fukui
Apr 28, 2026cs.HC

Co-Writing with AI: An Empirical Study of Diverse Academic Writing Workflows

Despite AI tools becoming increasingly embedded in academic practice, little is known about how university students integrate them into their writing processes. We examine how students engage with AI across different writing tasks, and how this engagement is shaped by individual factors including AI literacy, writing confidence, trust, authorship concerns, and motivation. Study1 surveys 107 UK university students to map task-specific and co-occurring patterns of AI use across five writing stages (ideation, sourcing, planning, drafting, and reviewing) and their associations with individual factors. Study2 complements this by exploring how these patterns can be assembled in practice, through interviews with 12 postgraduates reflecting on their established use of AI in assessed writing. Together, the studies suggest that AI integration is selective and heterogeneous, forming three recurring and value-oriented configurations: (1) early-stage (learning-oriented), where tools support exploration and understanding; (2) late-stage (quality-oriented), where tools support drafting and refinement; and (3) peripheral (productivity-oriented), where tools are used to reduce friction and sustain momentum across the process. We offer a workflow-level account of AI-supported academic writing, showing how students navigate competing priorities of learning, quality, productivity, and authorship, and how they evaluate and take responsibility for AI-generated outputs.
Silvia Bodei, Duncan P. Brumby, Katie Fisher +1
Apr 28, 2026cs.CY

Tracing GenAI Literacy: Uncovering Student-AI Interaction Patterns in Academic Writing through Epistemic Network Analysis

As Generative AI (GenAI) becomes integral to education, fostering GenAI literacy is critical. However, current assessments largely rely on self-reported scales, lacking insights into how literacy manifests in actual learning processes. This study leverages Learning Analytics (LA) to bridge this gap. We collected interaction logs from 162 university students engaged in a GenAI-assisted abstract writing task. Using Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA), we modeled and compared the questioning strategies of students with varying GenAI literacy levels. Preliminary results reveal distinct interaction signatures: high-literacy students engage in iterative refinement and strategic questioning, while low-literacy students rely on direct generation commands. This work contributes to the workshop by demonstrating how process data can characterize GenAI literacy, paving the way for data-driven literacy assessment and real-time interventions.
Angxuan Chen, Jiyou Jia
Apr 28, 2026cs.CY

A Faceted Proposal for Transparent Attribution of AI-Assisted Text Production

Artificial intelligence systems are increasingly integrated into writing processes, challenging traditional notions of authorship, responsibility, and intellectual contribution. Current disclosure practices usually indicate whether AI was used, but rarely explain how it was used, where it intervened, or how its output was reviewed. This paper proposes a faceted model for representing AI-assisted text production at the levels of documents, chapters, sections, and paragraphs. The proposal introduces a core model based on Form, Generation, and Evaluation, and an extended model that adds Intent, Control, and Traceability. The model is positioned as a minimal operational baseline with extensibility toward higher-fidelity representations. A worked example based on the production of this article demonstrates applicability.
Geraldo Xexéo
Apr 25, 2026cs.HC

Can Humans Detect AI? Mining Textual Signals of AI-Assisted Writing Under Varying Scrutiny Conditions

This study asks whether the threat of AI detection changes how people write with AI, and whether other people can tell the difference. In a two-phase controlled experiment, 21 participants wrote opinion pieces on remote work using an AI chatbot. Half were randomly warned that their submission would be scanned by an AI detection tool. The other half received no warning. Both groups had access to the same chatbot. In Phase 2, 251 independent judges evaluated 1,999 paired comparisons, each time choosing which document in the pair was written by a human. Judges were not told that both writers had access to AI. Across all evaluations, judges selected the warned writer's document as human 54.13% of the time versus 45.87% for the unwarned writer. A two-sided binomial test rejects chance guessing at p = 0.000243, and the result holds across both writing stances. Yet on every measurable text feature extracted, including AI overlap scores, lexical diversity, sentence structure, and pronoun usage, the two groups were indistinguishable. The judges are picking up on something that feature-based methods do not capture.
Daniel Tabach
Apr 24, 2026cs.CL

Measuring and Mitigating Persona Distortions from AI Writing Assistance

Hundreds of millions of people use artificial intelligence (AI) for writing assistance. Here, we evaluated how AI writing assistance distorts writer personas - their perceived beliefs, personality, and identity. In three large-scale experiments, writers (N=2,939) wrote political opinion paragraphs with and without AI assistance. Separate groups of readers (N=11,091) blindly evaluated these paragraphs across 29 socially salient dimensions of reader perception, spanning political opinion, writing quality, writer personality, emotions, and demographics. AI writing assistance produced persona distortions across all dimensions: with AI, writers seemed more opinionated, competent, and positive, and their perceived demographic profile shifted towards more privileged groups. Writers objected to many of the observed distortions, yet continued to prefer AI-assisted text even when made aware of them. We successfully mitigated objectionable persona distortions at the model level by training reward models on our experimental data (10,008 paragraphs, 2,903,596 ratings) to steer AI outputs towards faithful representation of writer stance. However, this came at a cost to user acceptance, suggesting an entanglement between desirable and undesirable properties of AI writing assistance that may be difficult to resolve. In two follow-up studies (N=8,798), readers placed substantially more trust in AI-assisted writers and were more persuaded by AI writing when AI was more distortive. Together, our findings demonstrate that persona distortions from AI writing assistance are pervasive and persistent even under realistic conditions of human oversight, and that they are likely to have consequential effects on human behaviours and attitudes, which carries implications for public discourse, trust, and democratic deliberation that scale with AI adoption.
Paul Röttger, Kobi Hackenburg, Hannah Rose Kirk +1
Apr 23, 2026cs.CL

Explainable Disentangled Representation Learning for Generalizable Authorship Attribution in the Era of Generative AI

Learning robust representations of authorial style is crucial for authorship attribution and AI-generated text detection. However, existing methods often struggle with content-style entanglement, where models learn spurious correlations between authors' writing styles and topics, leading to poor generalization across domains. To address this challenge, we propose Explainable Authorship Variational Autoencoder (EAVAE), a novel framework that explicitly disentangles style from content through architectural separation-by-design. EAVAE first pretrains style encoders using supervised contrastive learning on diverse authorship data, then finetunes with a Variational Autoencoder (VEA) architecture using separate encoders for style and content representations. Disentanglement is enforced through a novel discriminator that not only distinguishes whether pairs of style/content representations belong to the same or different authors/content sources, but also generates natural language explanation for their decision, simultaneously mitigating confounding information and enhancing interpretability. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of EAVAE. On authorship attribution, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on various datasets, including Amazon Reviews, PAN21, and HRS. For AI-generated text detection, EAVAE excels in few-shot learning over the M4 dataset. Code and data repositories are available online\footnote{https://github.com/hieum98/avae} \footnote{https://huggingface.co/collections/Hieuman/document-level-authorship-datasets}.
Hieu Man, Van-Cuong Pham, Nghia Trung Ngo +2
Apr 21, 2026cs.CL

Headlines You Won't Forget: Can Pronoun Insertion Increase Memorability?

For news headlines to influence beliefs and drive action, relevant information needs to be retained and retrievable from memory. In this probing study we draw on experiment designs from cognitive psychology to examine how a specific linguistic feature, namely direct address through first- and second-person pronouns, affects memorability and to what extent it is feasible to use large language models for the targeted insertion of such a feature into existing text without changing its core meaning. Across three controlled memorization experiments with a total of 240 participants, yielding 7,680 unique memory judgments, we show that pronoun insertion has mixed effects on memorability. Exploratory analyses indicate that effects differ based on headline topic, how pronouns are inserted and their immediate contexts. Additional data and fine-grained analysis is needed to draw definitive conclusions on these mediating factors. We further show that automatic revisions by LLMs are not always appropriate: Crowdsourced evaluations find many of them to be lacking in content accuracy and emotion retention or resulting in unnatural writing style. We make our collected data available for future work.
Selina Meyer, Magdalena Abel, Michael Roth
Apr 21, 2026cs.IR

Think Before Writing: Feature-Level Multi-Objective Optimization for Generative Citation Visibility

Generative answer engines expose content through selective citation rather than ranked retrieval, fundamentally altering how visibility is determined. This shift calls for new optimization methods beyond traditional search engine optimization. Existing generative engine optimization (GEO) approaches primarily rely on token-level text rewriting, offering limited interpretability and weak control over the trade-off between citation visibility and content quality. We propose FeatGEO, a feature-level, multi-objective optimization framework that abstracts webpages into interpretable structural, content, and linguistic properties. Instead of directly editing text, FeatGEO optimizes over this feature space and uses a language model to realize feature configurations into natural language, decoupling high-level optimization from surface-level generation. Experiments on GEO-Bench across three generative engines demonstrate that FeatGEO consistently improves citation visibility while maintaining or improving content quality, substantially outperforming token-level baselines. Further analyses show that citation behavior is more strongly influenced by document-level content properties than by isolated lexical edits, and that the learned feature configurations generalize across language models of different scales.
Zikang Liu, Peilan Xu
Apr 18, 2026cs.CY

The Reliance Negotiation Framework: A Dynamic Process Model of Student LLM Engagement in Academic Writing

Student engagement with large language models (LLMs) in academic writing is not a stable trait, an adoption decision, or a competency level; it is a continuously negotiated process that existing frameworks cannot adequately theorize. Typological models provide categories without mechanisms; technology acceptance models explain adoption but not post-adoption quality; AI literacy frameworks treat competency as a static predictor rather than a live input. None accounts for within-student variability across tasks, the developmental paradox whereby experience produces habituation rather than sophistication, or principled non-use as a form of ethical reasoning. This article introduces the Reliance Negotiation Framework (RNF), developed from a sequential explanatory mixed-methods study of 382 undergraduates at a public minority-serving institution in the United States (survey, N = 382; 14 semi-structured interviews; three qualitative survey strands; 1,435 coded instances). The RNF reconceptualizes LLM reliance as an ongoing negotiation among four concurrent inputs (perceived benefits, perceived risks, ethical commitments, and situational demands) with outputs that recursively modify subsequent decisions. A Two-Model Architecture accommodates the 13.0% of participants whose categorical ethical commitments foreclose negotiation entirely. The framework generates four falsifiable predictions with implications for AI literacy pedagogy, academic integrity policy, and equity-centered practice at minority-serving institutions.
Shahin Hossain
Apr 17, 2026cs.HC

From Intention to Text: AI-Supported Goal Setting in Academic Writing

This study presents WriteFlow, an AI voice-based writing assistant designed to support reflective academic writing through goal-oriented interaction. Academic writing involves iterative reflection and evolving goal regulation, yet prior research and a formative study with 17 participants show that writers often struggle to articulate and manage changing goals. While commonly used AI writing tools emphasize efficiency, they offer limited support for metacognition and writer agency. WriteFlow frames AI interaction as a dialogic space for ongoing goal articulation, monitoring, and negotiation grounded in writers' intentions. Findings from a Wizard-of-Oz study with 12 expert users show that WriteFlow scaffolds metacognitive regulation and reflection-in-action by supporting iterative goal refinement, maintaining goal-text alignment during drafting, and prompting evaluation of goal fulfillment. We discuss design implications for AI writing systems that prioritize reflective dialogue, flexible goal structures, and multi-perspective feedback to support intentional and agentic writing.
Yueling Fan, Richard Lee Davis, Olga Viberg
Apr 16, 2026cs.AI

An Axiomatic Benchmark for Evaluation of Scientific Novelty Metrics

The rigorous evaluation of the novelty of a scientific paper is, even for human scientists, a challenging task. With the increasing interest in AI scientists and AI involvement in scientific idea generation and paper writing, it also becomes increasingly important that this task be automatable and reliable, lest both human attention and compute tokens be wasted on ideas that have already been explored. Due to the challenge of quantifying ground-truth novelty, however, existing novelty metrics for scientific papers generally validate their results against noisy, confounded signals such as citation counts or peer review scores. These proxies can conflate novelty with impact, quality, or reviewer preference, which in turn makes it harder to assess how well a given metric actually evaluates novelty. We therefore propose an axiomatic benchmark for scientific novelty metrics. We first define a set of axioms that a well-behaved novelty metric should satisfy, grounded in human scientific norms and practice, then evaluate existing metrics across ten tasks spanning three domains of AI research. Our results reveal that no existing metric satisfies all axioms consistently, and that metrics fail on systematically different axioms, reflecting their underlying architectures. Additionally, we show that combining metrics of complementary architectures leads to consistent improvements on the benchmark, with per-axiom weighting achieving 90.1% versus 71.5% for the best individual metric, suggesting that developing architecturally diverse metrics is a promising direction for future work. We release the benchmark code as supplementary material to encourage the development of more robust scientific literature novelty metrics.
Miri Liu, ChengXiang Zhai
Jan 7, 2026cs.CL

Gavel: Agent Meets Checklist for Evaluating LLMs on Long-Context Legal Summarization

Large language models (LLMs) now support contexts of up to 1M tokens, but their strengths and weaknesses on complex long-context tasks remain unclear. To study this, we focus on multi-document legal case summarization, where a single case often spans many documents exceeding 100K tokens. We systematically evaluate 12 frontier LLMs with Gavel, which consists of Gavel-Ref, a reference-based evaluation framework with checklist, residual-fact, and writing-style evaluations, and Gavel-Agent, a reference-free agent for evaluating factual coverage directly from source documents. Our results show that current models are more prone to omitting key information than hallucinating. They all perform well on simple checklist items, such as filing date, but struggle with rare and complex items, such as settlements. Performance also declines as case length increases. To meta-evaluate Gavel, we collect 160 hours of human annotations. Gavel-Agent reduces token usage by at least 36% compared to end-to-end and chunk-by-chunk methods while achieving competitive performance. Gavel-Agent also generalizes to the medical domain, performing the best with at least 77% fewer tokens.
Yao Dou, Benjamin Mamut, Wei Xu
Aug 8, 2025cs.CL

Evaluating Style-Personalized Text Generation: Challenges and Directions

With the surge of large language models (LLMs) and their ability to produce customized output, style-personalized text generation--"write like me"--has become a rapidly growing area of interest. However, style personalization is highly specific, relative to every user, and depends strongly on the pragmatic context, which makes it uniquely challenging. Although prior research has introduced benchmarks and metrics for this area, they tend to be non-standardized and have known limitations (e.g., poor correlation with human subjects). LLMs have been found to not capture author-specific style well, it follows that the metrics themselves must be scrutinized carefully. In this work we critically examine the effectiveness of the most common metrics used in the field, such as BLEU, embeddings, and LLMs-as-judges. We evaluate these metrics using our proposed style discrimination benchmark, which spans eight diverse writing tasks across three evaluation settings: domain discrimination, authorship attribution, and LLM-generated personalized vs non-personalized discrimination. We find strong evidence that employing ensembles of diverse evaluation metrics consistently outperforms single-evaluator methods, and conclude by providing guidance on how to reliably assess style-personalized text generation.
Anubhav Jangra, Bahareh Sarrafzadeh, Silviu Cucerzan +2
Jul 4, 2025cs.HC

Interaction Techniques that Encourage Longer Prompts Can Improve Psychological Ownership when Writing with AI

Writing longer prompts for an AI assistant to generate a story increases psychological ownership, a user's feeling that the writing belongs to them. To encourage users to write longer prompts, we evaluated two interaction techniques that modify the prompt entry interface of chat-based generative AI assistants: pressing and holding the prompt submission button, and continuously moving a slider up and down when submitting a short prompt. A within-subjects experiment investigated the effects of such techniques on prompt length and psychological ownership, and results showed that these techniques increased prompt length and led to higher psychological ownership than baseline techniques. A second experiment further augmented these techniques by showing AI-generated suggestions for how the prompts could be expanded. This further increased prompt length, but did not lead to improvements in psychological ownership. Our results show that simple interface modifications like these can elicit more writing from users and improve psychological ownership.
Nikhita Joshi, Daniel Vogel