Traditionally, writing assistance systems have focused on short or even single-word suggestions. Recently, large language models like GPT-3 have made it possible to generate significantly longer natural-sounding suggestions, offering more advanced assistance opportunities. This study explores the trade-offs between sentence- vs. message-level suggestions for AI-mediated communication. We recruited 120 participants to act as staffers from legislators’ offices who often need to respond to large volumes of constituent concerns. Participants were asked to reply to emails with different types of assistance. The results show that participants receiving message-level suggestions responded faster and were more satisfied with the experience, as they mainly edited the suggested drafts. In addition, the texts they wrote were evaluated as more helpful by others. In comparison, participants receiving sentence-level assistance retained a higher sense of agency, but took longer for the task as they needed to plan the flow of their responses and decide when to use suggestions. Our findings have implications for designing task-appropriate communication assistance systems.

Aided by technology, people are increasingly able to communicate across geographical, cultural, and language barriers.This ability also results in new challenges, as interlocutors need to adapt their communication approaches to increasingly diverse circumstances.In this work, we take the first steps towards automatically assisting people in adjusting their language to a specific communication circumstance.As a case study, we focus on facilitating the accurate transmission of pragmatic intentions and introduce a methodology for suggesting paraphrases that achieve the intended level of politeness under a given communication circumstance.We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by evaluating our method in two realistic communication scenarios and show that it can reduce the potential for misalignment between the speaker's intentions and the listener's perceptions in both cases.

Jonathan P. Chang, Caleb Chiam, Liye Fu, Andrew Wang, Justine Zhang, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil. Proceedings of the 21th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue. 2020.

Group discussions are a way for individuals to exchange ideas and arguments in order to reach better decisions than they could on their own. One of the premises of productive discussions is that better solutions will prevail, and that the idea selection process is mediated by the (relative) competence of the individuals involved. However, since people may not know their actual competence on a new task, their behavior is influenced by their self-estimated competence -- that is, their confidence -- which can be misaligned with their actual competence.