Tal August
Assistant Professor, School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
Photo: Mike Thomas
I am an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I lead the Language Interaction Lab. I study how AI systems can make information accessible to more people. I pursue this goal by (1) evaluating AI systems’ ability to communicate specialized information to different people and (2) creating new interactions that augment people’s ability to communicate (read, write, and listen).
Interested in joining the lab? See the students page for how to apply.
news
| 08/17/26 | Thank you to AICE for a generous gift to research personalization! |
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| 08/10/26 | 2 papers accepted to EMNLP Main and 1 to COLM! |
| 05/01/26 | Yifan got 2 papers accepted to ACL! 1 Demo and 1 main track paper. |
| 01/15/26 | We have 6 papers going to CHI 2026 this year! The papers represent my lab’s growing focus on human-centered AI in high-stakes domains like Law, Medicine, and Science. More details about each paper coming soon. |
| 12/09/24 | Thank you to the Allen Institute for AI for a generous gift to research personalizing literature searches to individual researchers! |
selected publications
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Designing Beyond Language: Sociotechnical Barriers in AI Health Technologies for Limited English ProficiencyIn Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2026🏆 Honorable Mention (top 5%) -
Who Plays Which Role When? Communication Role Dynamics for Peer Recognition and Team Performance PredictionIn Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2026 -
From Crafting Text to Crafting Thought: Grounding Intelligent Writing Support to Writing Center PedagogyIn Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2026 -
How Language Formality in Security and Privacy Interfaces Impacts Intended ComplianceIn Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2023 -
Writing Strategies for Science Communication: Data and Computational AnalysisIn Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2020
