Tal August

Assistant Professor, School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign

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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!
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

  1. Zhang2026Words.png
    From Words to Widgets for Controllable LLM Generation
    Chao Zhang, Yiren Liu, Lunyiu Nie, and 3 more authors
    In ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), 2026
  2. Liu2026FOXGLOVE.png
    FOXGLOVE: Understanding Goal-Oriented and Anchored Writing Feedback from Experts and LLMs on Argumentative Essays
    Yijun Liu, Yifan Song, John Gallagher, and 2 more authors
    In Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2026
  3. Huang2025Living.png
    Living Contracts: Beyond Document-Centric Interaction with Legal Agreements
    Ziheng Huang, Robin Kar, Hari Sundaram, and 1 more author
    In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2026
  4. Huang2025Designing.png
    Designing Beyond Language: Sociotechnical Barriers in AI Health Technologies for Limited English Proficiency
    Michelle Huang, Violeta J. Rodríguez, Koustuv Saha, and 1 more author
    In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2026
    🏆 Honorable Mention (top 5%)
  5. Song2026Who.png
    Who Plays Which Role When? Communication Role Dynamics for Peer Recognition and Team Performance Prediction
    Yifan Song, Wenxuan Wendy Shi, Brian P Bailey, and 1 more author
    In Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2026