arXiv subjects

Chi-Lan Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Chi-Lan Yang.

17 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

From Voice to Value: Leveraging AI to Enhance Spoken Online Reviews on the Go

Online reviews help people make better decisions. Review platforms usually depend on typed input, where leaving a good review requires significant effort because users must carefully organize and articulate their thoughts. This may discourage users from leaving comprehensive and high-quality reviews, especially when they are on the go. To address this challenge, we developed Vocalizer, a mobile application that enables users to provide reviews through voice input, with enhancements from a large language model (LLM). In a longitudinal study, we analysed user interactions with the app, focusing on AI-driven features that help refine and improve reviews. Our findings show that users frequently utilized the AI agent to add more detailed information to their reviews. We also show how interactive AI features can improve users self-efficacy and willingness to share reviews online. Finally, we discuss the opportunities and challenges of integrating AI assistance into review-writing systems.

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arXiv2026

From Style Replication to Style Exploration: Enabling Art Style Exploration with Analyze-Experiment-Resituate Framework

Art style is a signature of professional digital artists that develops through repeated experimentation, reflection, and adaptation. While generative AI (GenAI) can reproduce styles with high fidelity, current tools provide limited support for exploring new stylistic directions and may encourage style replication over exploration. To address this gap, we propose Analyze-Experiment-Resituate (AER), a framework for AI-assisted style exploration derived from interviews with 10 professional digital artists. Rather than prioritizing visually appealing outputs alone, AER supports three core practices of style exploration, including interpreting references, trying out stylistic possibilities, and reflecting on how emerging styles may be received. Specifically, AER enabled artists to (1) analyze artworks into interpretable stylistic elements, (2) have controllable experimentation guided by their own choices, and (3) resituate emerging styles through simulated social perspectives. We implemented AER in a prototype system and evaluated it in a controlled study with 16 artists. Compared with a direct style-transfer workflow, AER increased artists' agency and reflection as they pursued new stylistic directions. A two-week field study with four artists revealed how the AER framework influenced daily style exploration, such as reflection, experimentation, and stylistic decision-making at each stage. We discuss opportunities and challenges in designing AI-assisted style-exploration workflows, and outline implications for future artistic support tools.

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arXiv2026

Understanding and Supporting Online Discussion with Opinionated Chatbots

Opinionated chatbots are increasingly present on online platforms and have the potential to shape public discourse by influencing individuals' viewpoints before they engage in discussions. Despite their growing presence, the impact of interacting with opinionated chatbots on subsequent online interactions remains largely unexplored. This study investigated how exposure to different types of opinionated chatbots, specifically those expressing opposing, reinforcing, or balanced viewpoints, affected participants' subsequent online discussions. In a controlled experiment with 83 participants, we found that interacting with an opinionated chatbot that consistently opposed participants' arguments led to greater shifts in opinion, indicating enhanced openness to revising one's initial stance. Conversely, participants who interacted with a chatbot that consistently reinforced their views were more likely to adopt more agreeable communication styles in subsequent conversations with others. Furthermore, interactions with different types of opinionated chatbots resulted in varying levels of trust, as well as different perceptions of chatbots and human interlocutors. Our findings indicate that opinionated chatbots can influence both individuals' opinions on social topics and their communication behaviors in online environments. This presents a trade-off for future designers seeking to facilitate cognitive flexibility in changing opinions while maintaining positive user experiences and trust in the chatbots during public discourse. We discuss the implications for designing opinionated chatbots to promote more constructive and less polarized online

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arXiv2026

Understanding Older Adults' Experiences of Support, Concerns, and Risks from Kinship-Role AI-Generated Influencers

AI-generated influencers are rapidly gaining popularity on Chinese short-video platforms, often adopting kinship-based roles such as AI grandchildren to attract older adults. Although this trend has raised public concern, little is known about the design strategies behind these influencers, how older adults experience them, and the benefits and risks involved. In this study, we combined social media analysis with interviews to unpack the above questions. Our findings show that influencers use both visual and conversational cues to enact kinship roles, prompting audiences to engage in kinship-based role-play. Interviews further show that these cues arouse emotional resonance, help fulfill older adults' informational and emotional needs, while also raising concerns about emotional displacement and unequal emotional investment. We highlight the complex relationship between virtual avatars and real family ties, shaped by broader sociocultural norms, and discuss how AI might strengthen social support for older adults while mitigating risks within cultural contexts.

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arXiv2026

Punchlines Unbound: Comedy Practices in Social Virtual Reality

Social VR platforms serve as an emergent venue for live performance, enabling co-presence and real-time interaction among distributed performers and audiences within shared virtual environments. Live performances, such as comedy, rely on subtle social cues between performers and audiences, which are missing in VR. However, it remains unclear how comedians utilize avatar-mediated cues in social VR. We conducted semi-structured interviews and observations with 23 virtual comedians on VRChat. Results revealed that virtual comedians transformed their limited nonverbal expressiveness into performative opportunities through intentional control and exaggeration. Additionally, a distinctive culture emerged around context-appropriate emoji reactions from audiences, while challenges such as audio latency and moderation against trolling were highlighted. Our findings advance understanding of how performers creatively adapt to expressive constraints in avatar-mediated settings. We further demonstrate how challenges in performer-audience interaction and moderation provide design insights for systems enhancing feedback visibility and sustain community norms without restricting creative expression.

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arXiv2026

LLM-based In-situ Thought Exchanges for Critical Paper Reading

Critical reading is a primary way through which researchers develop their critical thinking skills. While exchanging thoughts and opinions with peers can strengthen critical reading, junior researchers often lack access to peers who can offer diverse perspectives. To address this gap, we designed an in-situ thought exchange interface informed by peer feedback from a formative study (N=8) to support junior researchers' critical paper reading. We evaluated the effects of thought exchanges under three conditions (no-agent, single-agent, and multi-agent) with 46 junior researchers over two weeks. Our results showed that incorporating agent-mediated thought exchanges during paper reading significantly improved participants' critical thinking scores compared to the no-agent condition. In the single-agent condition, participants more frequently made reflective annotations on the paper content. In the multi-agent condition, participants engaged more actively with agents' responses. Our qualitative analysis further revealed that participants compared and analyzed multiple perspectives in the multi-agent condition. This work contributes to understanding in-situ AI-based support for critical paper reading through thought exchanges and offers design implications for future research.

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arXiv2026

Conversational Inoculation to Enhance Resistance to Misinformation

Proliferation of misinformation is a globally acknowledged problem. Cognitive Inoculation helps build resistance to different forms of persuasion, such as misinformation. We investigate Conversational Inoculation, a method to help people build resistance to misinformation through dynamic conversations with a chatbot. We built a Web-based system to implement the method, and conducted a within-subject user experiment to compare it with two traditional inoculation methods. Our results validate Conversational Inoculation as a viable novel method, and show how it was able to enhance participants' resistance to misinformation. A qualitative analysis of the conversations between participants and the chatbot reveal independence and trust as factors that boosted the efficiency of Conversational Inoculation, and friction of interaction as a factor hindering it. We discuss the opportunities and challenges of using Conversational Inoculation to combat misinformation. Our work contributes a timely investigation and a promising research direction in scalable ways to combat misinformation.

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arXiv2026

AI Personalization Paradox: Personalized AI Increases Superficial Engagement in Reading while Undermines Autonomy and Ownership in Writing

AI-assisted writing raises concerns about autonomy and ownership when benefiting writers. Personalization has been proposed as an effective solution while also risking writers' reliance on AI and behavior shifting. For better personalization design, existing studies rely on interaction and information solely within the writing phase; however, few studies have examined how reading behaviors can inform personalized writing. This study investigates the effects of integrating reading highlights for personalization on AI-assisted writing. A between-subjects study with 46 participants revealed that the personalization condition encouraged participants to produce more highlights. However, highlighting unexpectedly shifted from a sense-making strategy to an instrumental act of "feeding the AI," leading to significant reliance on AI and declines in writers' sense of autonomy, ownership, and self-credit. These findings indicate personalization risks in AI-assisted writing, emphasize the importance of personalization strategies, and provide design implications.

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arXiv2026

Understanding Reader Perception Shifts upon Disclosure of AI Authorship

As AI writing support becomes ubiquitous, how disclosing its use affects reader perception remains a critical, underexplored question. We conducted a study with 261 participants to examine how revealing varying levels of AI involvement shifts author impressions across six distinct communicative acts. Our analysis of 990 responses shows that disclosure generally erodes perceptions of trustworthiness, caring, competence, and likability, with the sharpest declines in social and interpersonal writing. A thematic analysis of participants' feedback links these negative shifts to a perceived loss of human sincerity, diminished author effort, and the contextual inappropriateness of AI. Conversely, we find that higher AI literacy mitigates these negative perceptions, leading to greater tolerance or even appreciation for AI use. Our results highlight the nuanced social dynamics of AI-mediated authorship and inform design implications for creating transparent, context-sensitive writing systems that better preserve trust and authenticity.

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arXiv2025

Understanding and Supporting Co-viewing Comedy in VR with Embodied Expressive Avatars

Co-viewing videos with family and friends remotely has become prevalent with the support of communication channels such as text messaging or real-time voice chat. However, current co-viewing platforms often lack visible embodied cues, such as body movements and facial expressions. This absence can reduce emotional engagement and the sense of co-presence when people are watching together remotely. Although virtual reality (VR) is an emerging technology that allows individuals to participate in various social activities while embodied as avatars, we still do not fully understand how this embodiment in VR affects co-viewing experiences, particularly in terms of engagement, emotional contagion, and expressive norms. In a controlled experiment involving eight triads of three participants each (N=24), we compared the participants' perceptions and reactions while watching comedy in VR using embodied expressive avatars that displayed visible laughter cues. This was contrasted with a control condition where no such embodied expressions were presented. With a mixed-method analysis, we found that embodied laughter cues shifted participants' engagement from individual immersion to socially coordinated participation. Participants reported heightened self-awareness of emotional expression, greater emotional contagion, and the development of expressive norms surrounding co-viewers' laughter. The result highlighted the tension between individual engagement and interpersonal emotional accommodation when co-viewing with embodied expressive avatars.

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arXiv2025

Understanding and Supporting Peer Review Using AI-reframed Positive Summary

While peer review enhances writing and research quality, harsh feedback can frustrate and demotivate authors. Hence, it is essential to explore how critiques should be delivered to motivate authors and enable them to keep iterating their work. In this study, we explored the impact of appending an automatically generated positive summary to the peer reviews of a writing task, alongside varying levels of overall evaluations (high vs. low), on authors' feedback reception, revision outcomes, and motivation to revise. Through a 2x2 online experiment with 137 participants, we found that adding an AI-reframed positive summary to otherwise harsh feedback increased authors' critique acceptance, whereas low overall evaluations of their work led to increased revision efforts. We discuss the implications of using AI in peer feedback, focusing on how AI-driven critiques can influence critique acceptance and support research communities in fostering productive and friendly peer feedback practices.

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arXiv2025

Timing Matters: How Using LLMs at Different Timings Influences Writers' Perceptions and Ideation Outcomes in AI-Assisted Ideation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely used to support ideation in the writing process. However, whether generating ideas with the help of LLMs leads to idea fixation or idea expansion is unclear. This study examines how different timings of LLM usage - either at the beginning or after independent ideation - affect people's perceptions and ideation outcomes in a writing task. In a controlled experiment with 60 participants, we found that using LLMs from the beginning reduced the number of original ideas and lowered creative self-efficacy and self-credit, mediated by changes in autonomy and ownership. We discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with using LLMs to assist in idea generation. We propose delaying the use of LLMs to support ideation while considering users' self-efficacy, autonomy, and ownership of the ideation outcomes.

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arXiv2025

Understanding and Supporting Formal Email Exchange by Answering AI-Generated Questions

Replying to formal emails is time-consuming and cognitively demanding, as it requires crafting polite phrasing and providing an adequate response to the sender's demands. Although systems with Large Language Models (LLMs) were designed to simplify the email replying process, users still need to provide detailed prompts to obtain the expected output. Therefore, we proposed and evaluated an LLM-powered question-and-answer (QA)-based approach for users to reply to emails by answering a set of simple and short questions generated from the incoming email. We developed a prototype system, ResQ, and conducted controlled and field experiments with 12 and 8 participants. Our results demonstrated that the QA-based approach improves the efficiency of replying to emails and reduces workload while maintaining email quality, compared to a conventional prompt-based approach that requires users to craft appropriate prompts to obtain email drafts. We discuss how the QA-based approach influences the email reply process and interpersonal relationship dynamics, as well as the opportunities and challenges associated with using a QA-based approach in AI-mediated communication.

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arXiv2024

When Group Spirit Meets Personal Journeys: Exploring Motivational Dynamics and Design Opportunities in Group Therapy

Psychotherapy, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), is effective in treating various mental disorders. Technology-facilitated mental health therapy improves client engagement through methods like digitization or gamification. However, these innovations largely cater to individual therapy, ignoring the potential of group therapy-a treatment for multiple clients concurrently, which enables individual clients to receive various perspectives in the treatment process and also addresses the scarcity of healthcare practitioners to reduce costs. Notwithstanding its cost-effectiveness and unique social dynamics that foster peer learning and community support, group therapy, such as group CBT, faces the issue of attrition. While existing medical work has developed guidelines for therapists, such as establishing leadership and empathy to facilitate group therapy, understanding about the interactions between each stakeholder is still missing. To bridge this gap, this study examined a group CBT program called the Serigaya Methamphetamine Relapse Prevention Program (SMARPP) as a case study to understand stakeholder coordination and communication, along with factors promoting and hindering continuous engagement in group therapy. In-depth interviews with eight facilitators and six former clients from SMARPP revealed the motivators and demotivators for facilitator-facilitator, client-client, and facilitator-client communications. Our investigation uncovers the presence of discernible conflicts between clients' intrapersonal motivation as well as interpersonal motivation in the context of group therapy through the lens of self-determination theory. We discuss insights and research opportunities for the HCI community to mediate such tension and enhance stakeholder communication in future technology-assisted group therapy settings.

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arXiv2024

AI as Extraherics: Fostering Higher-order Thinking Skills in Human-AI Interaction

As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, including generative AI, continue to evolve, concerns have arisen about over-reliance on AI, which may lead to human deskilling and diminished cognitive engagement. Over-reliance on AI can also lead users to accept information given by AI without performing critical examinations, causing negative consequences, such as misleading users with hallucinated contents. This paper introduces extraheric AI, a human-AI interaction conceptual framework that fosters users' higher-order thinking skills, such as creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving, during task completion. Unlike existing human-AI interaction designs, which replace or augment human cognition, extraheric AI fosters cognitive engagement by posing questions or providing alternative perspectives to users, rather than direct answers. We discuss interaction strategies, evaluation methods aligned with cognitive load theory and Bloom's taxonomy, and future research directions to ensure that human cognitive skills remain a crucial element in AI-integrated environments, promoting a balanced partnership between humans and AI.

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arXiv2024

SealMates: Supporting Communication in Video Conferencing using a Collective Behavior-Driven Avatar

The limited nonverbal cues and spatially distributed nature of remote communication make it challenging for unacquainted members to be expressive during social interactions over video conferencing. Though it enables seeing others' facial expressions, the visual feedback can instead lead to unexpected self-focus, resulting in users missing cues for others to engage in the conversation equally. To support expressive communication and equal participation among unacquainted counterparts, we propose SealMates, a behavior-driven avatar in which the avatar infers the engagement level of the group based on collective gaze and speech patterns and then moves across interlocutors' windows in the video conferencing. By conducting a controlled experiment with 15 groups of triads, we found the avatar's movement encouraged people to experience more self-disclosure and made them perceive everyone was equally engaged in the conversation than when there was no behavior-driven avatar. We discuss how a behavior-driven avatar influences distributed members' perceptions and the implications of avatar-mediated communication for future platforms.

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arXiv2023

The Empathic Metaverse: An Assistive Bioresponsive Platform For Emotional Experience Sharing

The Metaverse is poised to be a future platform that redefines what it means to communicate, socialize, and interact with each other. Yet, it is important for us to consider avoiding the pitfalls of social media platforms we use today; cyberbullying, lack of transparency and an overall false mental model of society. In this paper, we propose the Empathic Metaverse, a virtual platform that prioritizes emotional sharing for assistance. It aims to cultivate prosocial behaviour, either egoistically or altruistically, so that our future society can better feel for each other and assist one another. To achieve this, we propose the platform to be bioresponsive; it reacts and adapts to an individual's physiological and cognitive state and reflects this via carefully designed avatars, environments, and interactions. We explore this concept in terms of three research directions: bioresponsive avatars, mediated communications and assistive tools.

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