Bias towards people experiencing homelessness (PEH) is prevalent in online spaces. This project will leverage natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs) to identify, classify, and measure bias using geolocalized data collected from X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, meeting minutes, and news media across the United States. While public opinion often refers to addictions, criminality, and high levels of welfare spending to justify bias against PEH, we will conduct a comparative study to determine whether racial fractionalization is associated with homelessness bias. The results of the study aim to provide a new path to alleviate homelessness by unveiling the intersectional bias that affects PEH and minority racial groups. During the course of the project, we will deliver a lexicon, compile an annotated database for homelessness and homelessness-racism intersectional (HRI) bias, evaluate LLMs as classifiers of homelessness and HRI bias, develop homelessness and HRI bias metrics, and audit existing LLMs on HRI. In collaboration with non-profits and the city council of South Bend, Indiana, USA, our ultimate goal is to contribute to homelessness alleviation by counteracting social stigma, restoring the dignity and well-being of the persons affected.

This paper presents a study of using large language models (LLMs) in modifying existing code. While LLMs for generating code have been widely studied, their role in code modification remains less understood. Although “prompting” serves as the primary interface for developers to communicate intents to LLMs, constructing effective prompts for code modification introduces challenges different from generation. Prior work suggests that natural language summaries may help scaffold this process, yet such approaches have been validated primarily in narrow domains like SQL rewriting. This study investigates two prompting strategies for LLM-assisted code modification: Direct Instruction Prompting, where developers describe changes explicitly in free-form language, and SummaryMediated Prompting, where changes are made by editing the generated summaries of the code. We conducted an exploratory study with 15 developers who completed modification tasks using both techniques across multiple scenarios. Our findings suggest that developers followed an iterative workflow: understanding the code, localizing the edit, and validating outputs through execution or semantic reasoning. Each prompting strategy presented tradeoffs: direct instruction prompting was more flexible and easier to specify, while summary-mediated prompting supported comprehension, prompt scaffolding, and control. Developers’ choice of strategy was shaped by task goals and context, including urgency, maintainability, learning intent, and code familiarity. These findings highlight the need for more usable prompt interactions, including adjustable summary granularity, reliable summarycode traceability, and consistency in generated summaries.