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Ting-Hao 'Kenneth' Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Ting-Hao 'Kenneth' Huang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Label Over Logic? How Source Cues Bias Human Fallacy Judgments More Than LLMs

As AI-generated and AI-assisted content floods online spaces, source labels attached to such content can distort human reasoning judgments, with downstream consequences for moderation, evaluation, and decision-making. Whether LLMs share this vulnerability, or offer more source-agnostic evaluation, remains an open question with strong implications for human-AI collaboration. We examine this issue using logical fallacies as a controlled setting to isolate source-label effects on reasoning quality, independent of domain knowledge. We conduct an online study (N=505) where participants are assigned to a source condition (human, AI, human with AI assistance, AI with human assistance, or no disclosure) and evaluate comments containing logical fallacies, comparing their judgments with those of LLMs (GPT-5.2, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Claude Sonnet 4.5), which were evaluated across the same source conditions. Human evaluators were significantly more susceptible to fallacies labeled as 'written by human' or 'written by human with AI assistance' and assigned higher trust ratings in these conditions. LLM evaluations remained comparatively stable across source labels, though performance varied across models. Confidence levels were similarly high across conditions for both humans and LLMs, regardless of the presence of fallacies. Our findings indicate that source-label bias is primarily a human vulnerability for logical fallacy evaluation, with potential implications in human-LLM collaboration in increasingly AI-mediated environments.

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"Newspaper Eat" Means "Not Tasty": A Taxonomy and Benchmark for Coded Language in Real-World Chinese Online Reviews

Coded language is an important part of human communication. It refers to cases where users intentionally encode meaning so that the surface text differs from the intended meaning and must be decoded to be understood. Current language models handle coded language poorly. Progress has been limited by the lack of real-world datasets and clear taxonomies. This paper introduces CodedLang, a dataset of 7,744 Chinese Google Maps reviews, including 900 reviews with span-level annotations of coded language. We developed a seven-class taxonomy that captures common encoding strategies, including phonetic, orthographic, and cross-lingual substitutions. We benchmarked language models on coded language detection, classification, and review rating prediction. Results show that even strong models can fail to identify or understand coded language. Because many coded expressions rely on pronunciation-based strategies, we further conducted a phonetic analysis of coded and decoded forms. Our code and dataset are publicly available. Together, our results highlight coded language as an important and underexplored challenge for real-world NLP systems.

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Five Years of SciCap: What We Learned and Future Directions for Scientific Figure Captioning

Between 2021 and 2025, the SciCap project grew from a small seed-funded idea at The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) into one of the central efforts shaping the scientific figure-captioning landscape. Supported by a Penn State seed grant, Adobe, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, what began as our attempt to test whether domain-specific training, which was successful in text models like SciBERT, could also work for figure captions expanded into a multi-institution collaboration. Over these five years, we curated, released, and continually updated a large collection of figure-caption pairs from arXiv papers, conducted extensive automatic and human evaluations on both generated and author-written captions, navigated the rapid rise of large language models (LLMs), launched annual challenges, and built interactive systems that help scientists write better captions. In this piece, we look back at the first five years of SciCap and summarize the key technical and methodological lessons we learned. We then outline five major unsolved challenges and propose directions for the next phase of research in scientific figure captioning.

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LaMP-Cap: Personalized Figure Caption Generation With Multimodal Figure Profiles

Figure captions are crucial for helping readers understand and remember a figure's key message. Many models have been developed to generate these captions, helping authors compose better quality captions more easily. Yet, authors almost always need to revise generic AI-generated captions to match their writing style and the domain's style, highlighting the need for personalization. Despite language models' personalization (LaMP) advances, these technologies often focus on text-only settings and rarely address scenarios where both inputs and profiles are multimodal. This paper introduces LaMP-Cap, a dataset for personalized figure caption generation with multimodal figure profiles. For each target figure, LaMP-Cap provides not only the needed inputs, such as figure images, but also up to three other figures from the same document--each with its image, caption, and figure-mentioning paragraphs--as a profile to characterize the context. Experiments with four LLMs show that using profile information consistently helps generate captions closer to the original author-written ones. Ablation studies reveal that images in the profile are more helpful than figure-mentioning paragraphs, highlighting the advantage of using multimodal profiles over text-only ones.

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Prompting in the Dark: Assessing Human Performance in Prompt Engineering for Data Labeling When Gold Labels Are Absent

Millions of users prompt large language models (LLMs) for various tasks, but how good are people at prompt engineering? Do users actually get closer to their desired outcome over multiple iterations of their prompts? These questions are crucial when no gold-standard labels are available to measure progress. This paper investigates a scenario in LLM-powered data labeling, "prompting in the dark," where users iteratively prompt LLMs to label data without using manually-labeled benchmarks. We developed PromptingSheet, a Google Sheets add-on that enables users to compose, revise, and iteratively label data through spreadsheets. Through a study with 20 participants, we found that prompting in the dark was highly unreliable -- only 9 participants improved labeling accuracy after four or more iterations. Automated prompt optimization tools like DSPy also struggled when few gold labels were available. Our findings highlight the importance of gold labels and the needs, as well as the risks, of automated support in human prompt engineering, providing insights for future tool design.

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Using Contextually Aligned Online Reviews to Measure LLMs' Performance Disparities Across Language Varieties

A language can have different varieties. These varieties can affect the performance of natural language processing (NLP) models, including large language models (LLMs), which are often trained on data from widely spoken varieties. This paper introduces a novel and cost-effective approach to benchmark model performance across language varieties. We argue that international online review platforms, such as Booking.com, can serve as effective data sources for constructing datasets that capture comments in different language varieties from similar real-world scenarios, like reviews for the same hotel with the same rating using the same language (e.g., Mandarin Chinese) but different language varieties (e.g., Taiwan Mandarin, Mainland Mandarin). To prove this concept, we constructed a contextually aligned dataset comprising reviews in Taiwan Mandarin and Mainland Mandarin and tested six LLMs in a sentiment analysis task. Our results show that LLMs consistently underperform in Taiwan Mandarin.

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Hashtag Re-Appropriation for Audience Control on Recommendation-Driven Social Media Xiaohongshu (rednote)

Algorithms have played a central role in personalized recommendations on social media. However, they also present significant obstacles for content creators trying to predict and manage their audience reach. This issue is particularly challenging for marginalized groups seeking to maintain safe spaces. Our study explores how women on Xiaohongshu (rednote), a recommendation-driven social platform, proactively re-appropriate hashtags (e.g., #Baby Supplemental Food) by using them in posts unrelated to their literal meaning. The hashtags were strategically chosen from topics that would be uninteresting to the male audience they wanted to block. Through a mixed-methods approach, we analyzed the practice of hashtag re-appropriation based on 5,800 collected posts and interviewed 24 active users from diverse backgrounds to uncover users' motivations and reactions towards the re-appropriation. This practice highlights how users can reclaim agency over content distribution on recommendation-driven platforms, offering insights into self-governance within algorithmic-centered power structures.

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Understanding How Paper Writers Use AI-Generated Captions in Figure Caption Writing

Figures and their captions play a key role in scientific publications. However, despite their importance, many captions in published papers are poorly crafted, largely due to a lack of attention by paper authors. While prior AI research has explored caption generation, it has mainly focused on reader-centered use cases, where users evaluate generated captions rather than actively integrating them into their writing. This paper addresses this gap by investigating how paper authors incorporate AI-generated captions into their writing process through a user study involving 18 participants. Each participant rewrote captions for two figures from their own recently published work, using captions generated by state-of-the-art AI models as a resource. By analyzing video recordings of the writing process through interaction analysis, we observed that participants often began by copying and refining AI-generated captions. Paper writers favored longer, detail-rich captions that integrated textual and visual elements but found current AI models less effective for complex figures. These findings highlight the nuanced and diverse nature of figure caption composition, revealing design opportunities for AI systems to better support the challenges of academic writing.

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Multi-LLM Collaborative Caption Generation in Scientific Documents

Scientific figure captioning is a complex task that requires generating contextually appropriate descriptions of visual content. However, existing methods often fall short by utilizing incomplete information, treating the task solely as either an image-to-text or text summarization problem. This limitation hinders the generation of high-quality captions that fully capture the necessary details. Moreover, existing data sourced from arXiv papers contain low-quality captions, posing significant challenges for training large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we introduce a framework called Multi-LLM Collaborative Figure Caption Generation (MLBCAP) to address these challenges by leveraging specialized LLMs for distinct sub-tasks. Our approach unfolds in three key modules: (Quality Assessment) We utilize multimodal LLMs to assess the quality of training data, enabling the filtration of low-quality captions. (Diverse Caption Generation) We then employ a strategy of fine-tuning/prompting multiple LLMs on the captioning task to generate candidate captions. (Judgment) Lastly, we prompt a prominent LLM to select the highest quality caption from the candidates, followed by refining any remaining inaccuracies. Human evaluations demonstrate that informative captions produced by our approach rank better than human-written captions, highlighting its effectiveness. Our code is available at https://github.com/teamreboott/MLBCAP

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CoCoLoFa: A Dataset of News Comments with Common Logical Fallacies Written by LLM-Assisted Crowds

Detecting logical fallacies in texts can help users spot argument flaws, but automating this detection is not easy. Manually annotating fallacies in large-scale, real-world text data to create datasets for developing and validating detection models is costly. This paper introduces CoCoLoFa, the largest known logical fallacy dataset, containing 7,706 comments for 648 news articles, with each comment labeled for fallacy presence and type. We recruited 143 crowd workers to write comments embodying specific fallacy types (e.g., slippery slope) in response to news articles. Recognizing the complexity of this writing task, we built an LLM-powered assistant into the workers' interface to aid in drafting and refining their comments. Experts rated the writing quality and labeling validity of CoCoLoFa as high and reliable. BERT-based models fine-tuned using CoCoLoFa achieved the highest fallacy detection (F1=0.86) and classification (F1=0.87) performance on its test set, outperforming the state-of-the-art LLMs. Our work shows that combining crowdsourcing and LLMs enables us to more effectively construct datasets for complex linguistic phenomena that crowd workers find challenging to produce on their own.

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What Color Scheme is More Effective in Assisting Readers to Locate Information in a Color-Coded Article?

Color coding, a technique assigning specific colors to cluster information types, has proven advantages in aiding human cognitive activities, especially reading and comprehension. The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has streamlined document coding, enabling simple automatic text labeling with various schemes. This has the potential to make color-coding more accessible and benefit more users. However, the impact of color choice on information seeking is understudied. We conducted a user study assessing various color schemes' effectiveness in LLM-coded text documents, standardizing contrast ratios to approximately 5.55:1 across schemes. Participants performed timed information-seeking tasks in color-coded scholarly abstracts. Results showed non-analogous and yellow-inclusive color schemes improved performance, with the latter also being more preferred by participants. These findings can inform better color scheme choices for text annotation. As LLMs advance document coding, we advocate for more research focusing on the "color" aspect of color-coding techniques.

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Generating Educational Materials with Different Levels of Readability using LLMs

This study introduces the leveled-text generation task, aiming to rewrite educational materials to specific readability levels while preserving meaning. We assess the capability of GPT-3.5, LLaMA-2 70B, and Mixtral 8x7B, to generate content at various readability levels through zero-shot and few-shot prompting. Evaluating 100 processed educational materials reveals that few-shot prompting significantly improves performance in readability manipulation and information preservation. LLaMA-2 70B performs better in achieving the desired difficulty range, while GPT-3.5 maintains original meaning. However, manual inspection highlights concerns such as misinformation introduction and inconsistent edit distribution. These findings emphasize the need for further research to ensure the quality of generated educational content.

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How Does Conversation Length Impact User's Satisfaction? A Case Study of Length-Controlled Conversations with LLM-Powered Chatbots

Users can discuss a wide range of topics with large language models (LLMs), but they do not always prefer solving problems or getting information through lengthy conversations. This raises an intriguing HCI question: How does instructing LLMs to engage in longer or shorter conversations affect conversation quality? In this paper, we developed two Slack chatbots using GPT-4 with the ability to vary conversation lengths and conducted a user study. Participants asked the chatbots both highly and less conversable questions, engaging in dialogues with 0, 3, 5, and 7 conversational turns. We found that the conversation quality does not differ drastically across different conditions, while participants had mixed reactions. Our study demonstrates LLMs' ability to change conversation length and the potential benefits for users resulting from such changes, but we caution that changes in text form may not necessarily imply changes in quality or content.

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If in a Crowdsourced Data Annotation Pipeline, a GPT-4

Recent studies indicated GPT-4 outperforms online crowd workers in data labeling accuracy, notably workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). However, these studies were criticized for deviating from standard crowdsourcing practices and emphasizing individual workers' performances over the whole data-annotation process. This paper compared GPT-4 and an ethical and well-executed MTurk pipeline, with 415 workers labeling 3,177 sentence segments from 200 scholarly articles using the CODA-19 scheme. Two worker interfaces yielded 127,080 labels, which were then used to infer the final labels through eight label-aggregation algorithms. Our evaluation showed that despite best practices, MTurk pipeline's highest accuracy was 81.5%, whereas GPT-4 achieved 83.6%. Interestingly, when combining GPT-4's labels with crowd labels collected via an advanced worker interface for aggregation, 2 out of the 8 algorithms achieved an even higher accuracy (87.5%, 87.0%). Further analysis suggested that, when the crowd's and GPT-4's labeling strengths are complementary, aggregating them could increase labeling accuracy.

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Inspo: Writing with Crowds Alongside AI

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to support creative writing has bloomed in recent years. However, it is less well understood how AI compares to on-demand human support. We explored how writers interact with both AI and crowd worker writing assistants in creative writing. We replicated the interface of the prior crowd-writing system, Heteroglossia, and developed Inspo, a text editor allowing users to request suggestions from AI models and crowd workers. In a one-week deployment study involving eight creative writers, we examined how often participants selected crowd workers when fluent AI text generators were also available. Findings showed a consistent decline in crowd worker usage, with participants favoring AI due to its faster responses and more consistent quality. We conclude with suggestions for future systems, recommending designs that account for the unique strengths and weaknesses of human versus AI assistants, strategies to address automation bias, and sociocultural views of writing.

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Good Data, Large Data, or No Data? Comparing Three Approaches in Developing Research Aspect Classifiers for Biomedical Papers

The rapid growth of scientific publications, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, emphasizes the need for tools to help researchers efficiently comprehend the latest advancements. One essential part of understanding scientific literature is research aspect classification, which categorizes sentences in abstracts to Background, Purpose, Method, and Finding. In this study, we investigate the impact of different datasets on model performance for the crowd-annotated CODA-19 research aspect classification task. Specifically, we explore the potential benefits of using the large, automatically curated PubMed 200K RCT dataset and evaluate the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs), such as LLaMA, GPT-3, ChatGPT, and GPT-4. Our results indicate that using the PubMed 200K RCT dataset does not improve performance for the CODA-19 task. We also observe that while GPT-4 performs well, it does not outperform the SciBERT model fine-tuned on the CODA-19 dataset, emphasizing the importance of a dedicated and task-aligned datasets dataset for the target task. Our code is available at https://github.com/Crowd-AI-Lab/CODA-19-exp.

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ConvXAI: Delivering Heterogeneous AI Explanations via Conversations to Support Human-AI Scientific Writing

Despite a surge collection of XAI methods, users still struggle to obtain required AI explanations. Previous research suggests chatbots as dynamic solutions, but the effective design of conversational XAI agents for practical human needs remains under-explored. This paper focuses on Conversational XAI for AI-assisted scientific writing tasks. Drawing from human linguistic theories and formative studies, we identify four design rationales: "multifaceted", "controllability", "mix-initiative", "context-aware drill-down". We incorporate them into an interactive prototype, ConvXAI, which facilitates heterogeneous AI explanations for scientific writing through dialogue. In two studies with 21 users, ConvXAI outperforms a GUI-based baseline on improving human-perceived understanding and writing improvement. The paper further discusses the practical human usage patterns in interacting with ConvXAI for scientific co-writing.

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Does Human Collaboration Enhance the Accuracy of Identifying LLM-Generated Deepfake Texts?

Advances in Large Language Models (e.g., GPT-4, LLaMA) have improved the generation of coherent sentences resembling human writing on a large scale, resulting in the creation of so-called deepfake texts. However, this progress poses security and privacy concerns, necessitating effective solutions for distinguishing deepfake texts from human-written ones. Although prior works studied humans' ability to detect deepfake texts, none has examined whether "collaboration" among humans improves the detection of deepfake texts. In this study, to address this gap of understanding on deepfake texts, we conducted experiments with two groups: (1) nonexpert individuals from the AMT platform and (2) writing experts from the Upwork platform. The results demonstrate that collaboration among humans can potentially improve the detection of deepfake texts for both groups, increasing detection accuracies by 6.36% for non-experts and 12.76% for experts, respectively, compared to individuals' detection accuracies. We further analyze the explanations that humans used for detecting a piece of text as deepfake text, and find that the strongest indicator of deepfake texts is their lack of coherence and consistency. Our study provides useful insights for future tools and framework designs to facilitate the collaborative human detection of deepfake texts. The experiment datasets and AMT implementations are available at: https://github.com/huashen218/llm-deepfake-human-study.git

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