Yifan Song

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2026

While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate writing feedback, there remains no systematic comparison of LLM and expert feedback on the dimensions that writing research identifies as central to revision: goal-orientation, anchoring to specific sentences, and prioritization. We introduce FOXGLOVE, a dataset of 696 feedback comments written by trained writing instructors on 69 twelfth-grade argumentative essays, paired with 1,644 comments generated from four frontier LLMs under a shared protocol, totaling 2,340 comments. We provide expert quality ratings on a subset of both instructor and LLM comments. We find that instructors and LLMs distribute feedback similarly across goals and essay positions, yet instructors and models diverge on the specific sentences on which to provide feedback. Additionally, we find that models tend to write more complex feedback and use fewer questions than instructors. LLM feedback also receives higher ratings on most dimensions of quality, as rated by instructors, but much of this advantage appears to be attributable to lengthier comments. FOXGLOVE enables systematic comparison of where human and LLM feedback align, diverge, and differ.
Team roles offer an interpretable lens on collaboration, yet computational studies of roles often rely on domain-specific personas or data-driven clustering rather than theory-grounded taxonomies. We operationalize a taxonomy of eight communication roles grounded in education literature and annotate a corpus of 6,307 Slack messages from 55 students across 18 teams in a semester-long computer science course project. We evaluate whether LLMs can approximate expert labels, enabling scalable, taxonomy-driven role annotation. Using these role labels, we characterize role dynamics over teams’ lifecycles, finding that different roles peak at different moments and that students enact a more diverse set of roles as projects progress. To evaluate the utility of our role constructs, we use them to predict peer recognition, outperforming lexical, conversational, and LLM-prompting baselines. To assess generalizability beyond the educational context, we apply the same role constructs to a public dataset (DeliData) to predict team performance improvement after deliberation, again exceeding prior performance.
Effective interdisciplinary communication is frequently hindered by domain-specific terms. These terms, or jargon, are dependent on a listener’s background, and rarely do listeners seek explanations due to distraction and social concerns. To address these concerns, we built ParseJargon, an interactive LLM-powered system providing real-time personalized jargon support tailored to users’ individual backgrounds in online meetings. We first evaluated the effectiveness of personalization in a controlled setting with human participants. By comparing ParseJargon against baseline (no support) and general-purpose (non-personalized) conditions, we found that ParseJargon provided more precise jargon identification, and enhanced participants’ comprehension, engagement, and appreciation of colleagues’ work. We then evaluated the potential for using ParseJargon in real-time meetings through a latency test.