The theory starts with a high-level statement: The motorsystem is a limited-capacity channel. From there, it derives propositions about the relationshipbetween performance and interface design through the construct of a target.

"Average movement time can be predicted as linear regression to the index of difficulty."

"The difficulty of selecting a target is proportional to its distance and inversely proportional to its width (index of difficulty)."

"If the user tries to increase speed, accuracy will be compromised, and vice versa: An increase in accuracy reduces speed."

Theories of interaction illuminate interactive phenomena beyond intuition and helpsolve design and engineering problems in HCI.

“Attempts at reaching a target are limited by the speed and variance (accuracy) of themovement involved.”

“Human motor system is a limited capacity information channel.”

Even seemingly mundane activities such as enteringtext have rich structures that can be uncovered by these theories.

For example, they can talk about information, difficulty, working memory, and so on.

Propositionscharacterize entities and link them to other entities, some of which are conceptual.

HCI theories contain statements that link humans andtechnology and possibly some outcomes (e.g., poor usability, high user experience).

In the case of particle physics, the propositions that make up a theory may con-cern the nature and behavior of particles.

A proposition is a claim about the world.

By now, it should be clear that the term interaction covers a lot of ground in human–computerinteraction (HCI).

Phenomena in interaction are emergent, that is, they are not attributable to the user or to the computer alone.

In general, a theory consists of a set of propositions, or statements.

Interaction also occurs in different contexts, including work, leisure, and in-between contexts such as commuting.

Interaction is a dynamic phenomenon that unfolds over time as users and computers influence each other.

What happens in interaction cannot be attributed solely to the human or the computer—the two must be considered together.

It has been used to describe individuals, groups, and communities using computers.

Moreover, interaction takes place at dif-ferent timescales.

Interaction is a core notion in HCI and refers to the mutual influence between people and computers.

Pressing a button takes about a hundred milliseconds; adopting an information system in a large organization can easily take months.

We have used it to discuss various applications, from a user typing on a smartphone to a team of information workers communicating via email.

For example, a photocopier can automatically sort and collate copies.

Ithasbeenusedtodescribeindividuals,groups,andcommunitiesusingcomputers.

Wehaveusedittodiscussvariousapplications,fromausertypingonasmart-phonetoateamofinformationworkerscommunicatingviaemail.

P8 said: "as I get familiar with this system [C3], I feel more skilled" to use the highlighted and grayed phrases.

It is worth noting that P3 and P8 mentioned feeling more comfortable with the more familiar visualization in C1 and C2 during their first impression of the conditions.

The inclusion of counterfactuals often resulted in a substantial increase in precision, indicating that the models were better able to correctly classify relevant instances while reducing false positives.

By visualizing these consistent pattern rules, users may be better understanding the behavior of the model through inference projection.

Mocha addresses two seemingly contradictory objectives: (1) generating labeled data that diversifies the training dataset to aid the model's learning, and (2) maintaining structural consistency across the batches of data presented to users to support their cognitive processes.

The results of our study indicate that participants spent significantly less time annotating batches of counterfactuals when they were rendered according to SAT compared to other conditions i.e., supporting the participants' selective focus on the varying phrases, rather than phrases that stay consistent.

From a cognitive perspective, the theme color aligns with the human's (theorized) structural mapping engine [27] by making relational discrepancies between the original and counterfactual examples more explicit.

Estes and Hasson [17] highlights the significant role of bringing salience to 'non-alignable' differences.

The last two prior works also combine Variation Theory (VT) and SAT together, as we did (i.e., a corollary of SAT referred to as Analogical Transfer/Learning Theory).

Estes and Hasson [17] highlights the significant role of bringing salience to "non-alignable" differences.

Estes and Hasson [17] argue that while alignable differences can be more straightforward and easier for comparison, non-alignable differences can also provide key information that might otherwise remain overlooked.

By incorporating theories such as Structural Alignment Theory and Variation Theory, it aims to support the learning of both the human and the model.

This symbiotic relationship stems from the fact that Structural Alignment Theory (SAT) enhances the salience of differences, while the way we used Variation Theory (VT) to generate contradicting examples across the boundaries of labels ensures that these differences are conceptually informative.

It states that understanding and sensemaking involve mapping the relationships between elements, especially in complex and ambiguous tasks.

Structural Alignment Theory states that humans naturally look for structural mapping between representations of objects to help them understand, compare, and infer relationships between said objects.

According to Variation Theory, learners better understand concepts by observing variations along critical features (dimensions of variation) that define that concept and, separately, observing variations along superficial features that do not define that concept—all while other features, when possible, are held constant.

Mocha exemplified the application of human cognition and concept learning theories in the interactive machine learning pipeline to support the negotiation of conceptual boundaries for bi-directional human-AI alignment.

This pattern of selective attention suggests that the visual cues provided by Mocha effectively guided participants to focus on more relevant information within the context of unchanged text when making their labeling decisions.

Overall, the incorporation of counterfactuals has generally improved the models' F1 scores, driven largely by the improvements in precision. This suggests that counterfactuals have effectively improved performance without necessitating a significant trade-off between precision and recall.

The inclusion of counterfactuals often resulted in a substantial increase in precision, indicating that the models were better able to correctly classify relevant instances while reducing false positives. This improvement suggests that the counterfactuals provided essential information that helped refine the models' decision boundaries.

By visualizing these consistent pattern rules, users may be better understanding the behavior of the model through inference projection [26]. This can not only boosts the model's performance but also enable participants to validate or correct the model during the interactive training process.

Thus, the integration of both theories enables users to efficiently process and compare variations, leading to more informed decisions and a clearer understanding of the model's behavior.

By helping users see alignable differences, SAT-based rendering helps users focus on key variations that are essential to changing the data item's label, making it easier to interpret the effects of changes and their significance.

We argue that these two theories form a symbiotic relationship (Fig. 6). Variation Theory provides the conceptual basis for generating structurally consistent differences, while Structural Alignment Theory (SAT) enhances the user's ability in recognizing and processing these differences.

Participants were able to efficiently focus on key differences between the original and counterfactual examples, which facilitated more efficient annotations.

The results from our user study suggest that both the participants and the model benefited from the Variation Theory (VT)-based counterfactuals and Structural Alignment Theory (SAT)-based rendering.

Thus, the integration of both the-ories enables users to efficiently process and compare variations,leading to more informed decisions and a clearer understanding ofthe model’s behavior.

Specifically, they underscore the need for co-adaptive systems that can evolve along with users' mental models and definitions of labels.

This requires the development of interfaces and visualizations that demystify the generated data, allowing systematic variation and coverage across the concept space.

By visualizing these consistent pattern rules, users may be better understanding the behavior of the model through inference projection [26].

By incorporating theories such as Structural Alignment Theory and Variation Theory, it aims to support the learning of both the human and the model.

Such studies could determine whether these non-alignable comparisons enhance user performance and elicit deeper insights in human-AI collaborative systems.

Most previous research in counterfactual generation has focused on the model side by either generating counterfactuals to improve the model's performance or explaining its behaviors post hoc.

Variation Theory provides the conceptual basis for generating structurally consistent differences, while Structural Alignment Theory (SAT) enhances the user's ability in recognizing and processing these differences.

While SAT-based rendering supported human sensemaking in both Gero et al. [29] and Mocha, we also show that the combination of VT and SAT support the model's learning.

This finding is consistent with previous work that supports users' sense-making of text, e.g., by modulating text saliency. Specifically, Gu et al. [32] and Gero et al. [29] both found improved reading efficiency and comprehension with saliency-modulating text renderings.

In decision making, SAT argues that people tend to focus on alignable differences—features that can be directly compared—rather than on differences that cannot be easily aligned.

Structural Alignment Theory (SAT) [27] is a cognitive theory that explains how people make sense of concepts by comparing relational structures between two items.

Specifically, we use Variation Theory of learning [44] which states that for learning to occur, some aspects that define the concept being learned must vary while others are held constant.

According to SAT, humans compare two similar entities by trying to find structural alignments between them, and then comparing corresponding elements, with a special focus on differing aligned elements.

VT posits that human learning occurs when learners experience variation across critical and superficial aspects of a concept—through exposure to contrasting examples that systematically vary along different critical and superficial feature dimensions.

To analyze the annotation efficiency, we first conducted a Kruskal-Wallis rank sum test [39] to determine if there were statistically significant differences in annotation time across the three conditions, because our data violated the homogeneity of variances assumption, making non-parametric methods more appropriate.

Mohamed et al. (2020) put forth the idea of dismantling power assymmetries to resist data colonialism.

Couldry and Mejias (2019) propose 'data colonialism' as a new form of colonialism to make sense of the use of large amounts of data by a small group of corporate and government actors.

Taken together, these findings almost unanimously show that, on average, AI-supported writing decreases but does not eliminate writer's feelings of ownership, underscoring the need for a larger theory of AI participation in the creative process.

This can be understood through the frame of precarious work [5]; as writers feel that their work is increasingly precarious, the power differential between themselves and the organizations seeking to train LLMs grows larger.

information scholars argue that data should be collected and used in accordance with data subjects' perspectives on the acceptable use of their data [29, 40, 83].

We recruited 12 active researchers by word of mouth followed bysnowball sampling [ 53 ]

Interviews were video and audio recorded. We transcribed the audio using OpenAI's Whisper automatic speech recognition system and anonymized the transcript before analysis.

Immediately after the focused reading task, we conducted a short interview asking participants to reflect on their experience with both tasks (Appendix J.2), followed by a post-study survey (Appendix J.3).

The study concluded with a 15-minute semi-structured interview. During the interview, participants saw screenshots from the three conditions and were asked which they preferred and disliked, why, what they wished the interface had, what influenced their skimming, and how they normally skimmed texts.

After the interviews, we analyzed the data using the process described in Appendix B

We used these mock-ups as design probes [31] to inspire ideation and elicit creative responses. Specifically, we asked participants to compare and contrast alternative mock-ups and reflect on how they could be used or improved to support their known or emerging synthesis and information-foraging goals.

In the second part of the session, we provided participants with mock-ups of possible reifications of cross-document relationships that might help them synthesize information across abstracts.

In the first part of the session, we asked participants about their strategies for selecting publication venues for their manuscript submissions, how they identify and synthesize information from venues, their approaches to writing manuscripts, and finally, the technology they have used to help with these processes, current technology shortcomings, and ideas for addressing these challenges.

Sessions, which were held on Zoom, lasted 55 minutes on average. Participants were compensated with $15 USD.

The interview sessions were divided into two parts: an open-ended semi-structured interview about their backgrounds and practices, followed by feedback on a range of mock-ups, including novel reified relationships between analogous sentences in different abstracts (Figure 2).

In order to determine (1) the context in which we might offer novel views of scientific abstracts and (2) the intelligibility of various novel prototype designs for reifying cross-abstract relationships, we conducted a formative interview study with 12 active researchers (see Appendix A for participant information).

pre-computing and reifying cross-document analogous relationships make it psychologically possible for users to engage—if they are willing to be guided by it. (Lower NFC users are more likely to fall into this category.)

Participants with lower NFC more frequently preferred and experienced less cognitive load when skimming with all the features enabled.

These results suggest that these three features lose their effectiveness when not used together.

Lower NFC participants were generally guided by emergent visual patterns created by the interactions between features, especially blocks of color spanning multiple sentences created when all three features are turned on.

Dialectical activities cannot be done on a user's behalf by AI; with variation affordances, AI is supporting the user's engagement with the data themselves.

In this sense, AbstractExplorer enables dialectical activities that users may otherwise have found to be too tedious or difficult to engage with.

Our work demonstrates that designs informed by Structure-Mapping Theory can support users in navigating, making use of, and engaging with variation present in information.

We posit that our approach can generalize to other domains such as journalism, code synthesis, and social media analytics where visual alignment of text can enable meaningful comparisons of underlying patterns to identify relational clarity.

We demonstrate how slicing sentences according to roles and visually aligning them can help readers perceive cross-document relationships in a coherent manner.

In this work, we introduce a new paradigm for exploring a large corpus of small documents by identifying roles at the phrasal and sentence levels, then slice on, reify, group, and/or align the text itself on those roles, with sentences left intact.

Like prior Structural Mapping Theory (SMT)-informed work in text corpora representation, AbstractExplorer's features have enabled some users to see more of both the overview and the details at the same time, facilitating abstraction without losing context.

Interviews were video and audio recorded. We transcribed the audio using OpenAI's Whisper automatic speech recognition system and anonymized the transcript before analysis. We analyzed the interview data using thematic analysis [1]. First, two members of the research team independently coded four (25% of collected data) randomly chosen participant data to generate low-level codes. The inter-coder reliability between the coders was 0.88 using Krippendorff's alpha [37]. The two coders then met together to cross-check, resolve coding conflicts, and consolidate the codes into a codebook across two sessions. Using the codebook, the two coders analyzed six randomly selected participant data each. The research team then met, discussed the analysis outcomes, and finalized themes over three sessions.

Our work demonstrates that designs informed by Structure-Mapping Theory can support users in navigating, making use of, and engaging with variation present in information. In this sense, AbstractExplorer enables dialectical activities that users may otherwise have found to be too tedious or difficult to engage with.

Together, the vertical and horizontal juxtapositions are designed to help users identify both high-level commonalities and nuanced variations across structurally similar sentences.

Dialectical activities cannot be done on a user's behalf by AI; with variation affordances, AI is supporting the user's engagement with the data themselves.

In this work, we introduce a new paradigm for exploring a large corpus of small documents by identifying roles at the phrasal and sentence levels, then slice on, reify, group, and/or align the text itself on those roles, with sentences left intact.

These observations underscored the need for an improved UI design for authoring custom aspects, especially for those who are less familiar with the research corpus.

Future work could explore more seamless ways of preserving context, such as allowing users to navigate through every sentence of an abstract directly within the Cross-Sentence Relationship pane, fostering a more cohesive understanding of the content.

Supporting a new corpus would require defining new corpus-appropriate predefined aspects and chunk role labels. Other components would likely be able to remain unchanged.

We posit that our approach can generalize to other domains such as journalism, code synthesis, and social media analytics where visual alignment of text can enable meaningful comparisons of underlying patterns to identify relational clarity.

We consider common sequences of chunk roles to be alignable structures that could be used to support users in identifying structural similarities and differences across sentences in different abstracts, in line with Structure-Mapping Theory [17].

Like prior Structural Mapping Theory (SMT)-informed work in text corpora representation, AbstractExplorer's features have enabled some users to see more of both the overview and the details at the same time, facilitating abstraction without losing context.

Our work demonstrates that designs informed by Structure-Mapping Theory can support users in navigating, making use of, and engaging with variation present in information.

According to SMT, this generalization depends on most documents having some shared implicit structure.

This ordering prioritizes dominant structural patterns (largest groups first) while exposing fine-grained variations (via length-sorted triplets), mirroring how humans compare sentences, if SMT is an accurate description in this domain of comparative close reading.

Structural mappings between objects are part of the cognitive process of comparison according to the Structure-Mapping Theory [17], and juxtaposition can facilitate humans in recognizing particular possible structural mappings between objects [75].

In SMT terminology, rendering and arranging according to corresponding chunks reify "commonalities in structure," while variation within corresponding chunks are "alignable differences" that users are predicted to notice.

The prior SMT-informed tools in Section 2.3 for both code and natural language corpora suggest that the cognitive process of comparing texts may be no exception to the cognitive processes SMT predicts.

SMT posits that visual alignment helps people perceive relational similarities and differences more clearly, thereby improving their ability to make meaningful comparisons and understand underlying patterns [28, 38, 47].

SMT provides a framework for understanding how humans compare two or more objects by finding common structural alignments between objects.

Structural Mapping Theory (SMT) is a long-standing well-vetted theory from Cognitive Science that describes how humans attend to and try to compare objects by finding mental representations of them that can be structurally mapped to each other (analogies).

This SMT-informed approach, which AbstractExplorer shares, tries to give this mental machinery "a leg up," letting users perhaps skip some steps by accepting reified cross-document relationships identified by the computer.

The human perceptual, comparative mental machinery that SMT describes is part of what enables humans to form more abstract structured mental models from concrete examples, among other critical knowledge tasks.

These examples of text-centric lossless techniques do not abstract away or summarize; they strategically re-organize and re-render the existing text to help enhance readers' own perceptual cognition, informed by Structural Mapping Theory (SMT) [17].

Theory (SMT) to facilitate seeing both the overview and the details at the same time, facilitating abstraction without losing context.

We process this data in a three-stage pipeline (Figure 6). In the first stage, Sentence Segmentation and Categorization, abstracts are split into individual sentences using the NLTK package, and each sentence is classified into one of the five pre-defined aspects as listed in Section 4.1.1. Classification is performed by prompting an LLM (see prompt used in Appendix D.1) with the sentence and its full abstract.

Then, we segment sentences within each aspect into grammar-preserving chunks (see prompt used in Appendix D.2). This results in grammatically coherent chunks that are the basis of structure patterns. After identifying chunk boundaries, we again prompt an LLM to generate labels for chunks in a human-in-the-loop approach: starting from an initial set of labels for chunk roles, when a new label is generated, a researcher from the research team examines the new label and merges it with existing labels if appropriate, controlling for the total number of labels.

In this study, we allowed participants to experience views of same-aspect sentences (Section 4.1.1) with different combinations of highlighting, ordering, and alignment (as described in Section 4.1.2 and Section 4.1.4) enabled or not, in order to understand which and/or what combinations most effectively supported users' ability to skim and read laterally across documents.

Inspired by GP-TSM [24], AbstractExplorer first segments sentences into grammar-preserving chunks—segments that respect grammatical boundaries, i.e., an LLM judges that the sentence can be truncated at that chunk boundary without breaking the grammatical integrity of the preceding text. Each chunk is then classified by an LLM as having one of nine pre-defined roles, each of which has its own assigned color.

AbstractExplorer classifies sentences into five pre-defined aspects common in CHI abstracts: Problem Domain, Gaps in Prior Work, Methodology/Contribution, Results/Findings, and Discussion/Conclusion.

We conducted a qualitative analysis of user study transcripts and survey responses using a Grounded Theory approach [8]. First, the lead researcher collected a list of participants' behaviors, approaches, reflections on their experience, and feedback about the interface. The researcher then systematically coded this data, revisiting the data multiples times and refining the codes to ensure consistency and coherence. Through this process, high-level themes were identified and organized using affinity diagramming. Once the thematic structure was finalized, the researcher gathered supporting evidence for each theme and synthesized the findings, which were reviewed by the research team to ensure agreement on the results.

Activity log data, which revealed how participants actually used the interface, echoed the above findings. According to the log data, participants spent most of their reading time (66.31%) with vertical alignment on the second element in structure pairs, followed by alignment on the first element (29.19%), and left-justified alignment (5.13%). Highlighting usage showed a similar preference: 91.13% of time with all chunks highlighted, 8.25% with partial highlighting, and minimal time (0.63%) without highlights.

In this section, we present findings on how AbstractExplorer supports comparative close reading at scale by integrating quantitative survey responses and log data with qualitative analysis of transcripts and open-ended responses. The qualitative analysis process is described in detail in Appendix H.

Throughout the two tasks, we also collected detailed interaction logs including counts of user-defined aspects created, duration of highlighting usage, and time allocation across the three possible alignment options.

Both gaze data and the semi-structured interviews revealed that lower NFC participants were more willing to be guided by the three features and took advantage of them consciously.

Using a two-tailed Mann-Whitney U Test, we found that participants who reported their lowest perceived cognitive load when all three features were enabled had significantly lower NFC than participants who reported their lowest cognitive load level when skimming with no features enabled—in the baseline interface (p=0.03).

The raw NASA-TLX score is the sum of all 6 NASA-TLX questions after reversing the appropriate questions.

To compute a participant's NFC score, we averaged their response to the six questions, each ranging from 1 to 7, after reversing the appropriate questions.

For simplicity of analysis, we denote participants with NFC scores above the overall participants' median NFC of 5.42 (IQR = 0.583) as higher NFC, and lower NFC otherwise.

To contrast participants' gaze patterns in each condition, we used a Tobii Pro Spark eye-tracker placed below the desktop monitor used by all subjects; Tobii Pro Lab software recorded each participant's gaze over time in each condition.

We collected 80 sentences from our abstracts dataset labeled by our system as "Methodology/Contribution." Participants viewed the same 80 sentences in each condition—often with a different subset of sentences initially visible due to ordering changes—but only had two minutes to look at them in each condition.

After obtaining an expanded set of high-level chunk labels, we assign them to each of the sentence chunks by using LLMs in a multiclass classification few-shot learning task, with the initial labels and assignment as examples (see prompt used in Appendix D.3).

Then, we segment sentences within each aspect into grammarpreserving chunks (see prompt used in Appendix D.2). This results in grammatically coherent chunks that are the basis of structure patterns. After identifying chunk boundaries, we again prompt an LLM to generate labels for chunks in a human-in-the-loop approach: starting from an initial set of labels for chunk roles, when a new label is generated, a researcher from the research team examines the new label and merges it with existing labels if appropriate, controlling for the total number of labels.

We process this data in a three-stage pipeline (Figure 6). In the first stage, Sentence Segmentation and Categorization, abstracts are split into individual sentences using the NLTK package, and each sentence is classified into one of the five pre-defined aspects as listed in Section 4.1.1. Classification is performed by prompting an LLM (see prompt used in Appendix D.1) with the sentence and its full abstract.

After the interviews, we analyzed the data using the process described in Appendix B

We conducted a study with 12 blind SR users.

We conducted a collaborative, user-centered design study with a team of scientific researchers.

We conducted quantitative (n=70) and qualitative (n=30) studies with healthcare experts.

We conducted a qualitative study with 16 blind and visually impaired (BI) developers.

We conducted role-playing exercises with 24 US journalists.

We conducted a study with 32 blind SR users.

We conducted a collaborative, user-centered design study with a team of scientific researchers.

We conducted quantitative (N=79) and qualitative (N=93) studies with healthcare experts.

We conducted a qualitative study with 35 blind and visually impaired (VI) Developers.

We conducted a study with 32 blind US users.

We conducted a study with 12 blind SR users.

We conducted a collaborative, user-centered design study with a team of scientific researchers.

We conducted quantitative (n=70) and qualitative (n=30) studies with healthcare experts.

using SemanticCommit, we recorded all instances of edits, check for conflicts, make change, local, and global resolution actions using telemetry.

A sub-task was considered a failure if the participant was unable to complete it within the time limit.

Finally, we conducted an informal interview about their experience.

After both tasks were completed, participants filled out a final survey to compare the two conditions.

We chose GPT-4o for performance and latency reasons, as it performed optimally against our evals.

We also ran evaluations of model latency and classification performance under varying false positive rates for the following LLMs by OpenAI: GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, and o3-mini.

For each task, participants were tasked with integrating three new pieces of information into the memory, one at a time ("sub-tasks").

We ensured each list was 30 items long as our pilot studies suggested this was long enough that manual detection starts to become unwieldy (users need to scroll up and down the document), but short enough that participants could become familiar in a short period.

We adapted two intent specifications from our evals: Mars Game Design Document and Financial Advice AI Agent Memory, as these tasks mapped to the two paradigmatic types covered in Sections 2 and 2.1 (design documents, and AI memory of the user).

We recruited 12 participants (7 female, 5 male) through the mailing lists of two research universities and one multinational technology company.

We chose OpenAI's ChatGPT Canvas as a baseline for five reasons: (i) it is a popular, commercially available tool, hence it is likely familiar to users; (ii) it provides a document editing view, where users can select text and ask GPT to rewrite it, or chat with an AI to make global edits; (iii) it employs a similar class of model (GPT-4o); (iv) it supports similar editing features as SemanticCommit like inline text selection, conflict highlighting, and a diff view, while adding free-form editing; and (v) similar interfaces like Anthropic Artifacts tended to rewrite the specification entirely, and did not offer Canvas's "diff" view to allow for a fair comparison.

With participant consent, we recorded audio and screen-casts, and participants were encouraged to think aloud.

Four coauthors created the evals, and two coauthors manually double-checked all conflicts, a process that took several days.

We ran one pilot study with five users of our card-based interface, and a second with four users of a revised interface.

Our explorations went through substantial iterations and prompt prototyping over a period of eight months, evolving in response to two pilot studies and progressing from a card-based interface to a list of texts.

We iterated on prompts using ChainForge [5] by setting up an evaluation pipeline against our datasets, which allowed us to observe the effects of prompt changes and model choices.

To measure statistical significance, we used Mann–Whitney–Wilcoxon tests and report the p-values.

For qualitative analysis, the first author performed open coding on participant responses and audio transcripts to identify themes, which were used to interpret the qualitative results.

In the post-task surveys, we collected self-reported NASA Task Load Index (TLX) scores, Likert-scale ratings for ease of use, and responses on how well the AI helped participants identify, understand, and resolve semantic conflicts.

Each condition had a time limit of 15 minutes, after which the participant completed a post-task survey.

Before each task, participants received a tutorial on the assigned tool and were given five minutes to explore it using a test document.

Both the order of task assignment and tool assignment were counterbalanced and randomly assigned.

We conducted a controlled within-subjects study with mixed methods, comparing SemanticCommit with a baseline interface.

We run end-to-end on our four eval datasets using GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini and report the mean ± stddev for accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scores for the three approaches in Figure 5.

We compare our end-to-end system against two simpler methods: (i) DropAllDocs, which adds all documents to the context for conflict classification; and (ii) InkSync [56] which generates a JSON list of string-replace operations.

In order to minimize relevance assessment issues, we apply a PageRank-based relevance ranking over the KG, akin to HippoRAG [36].

We implement the back-end using a knowledge-graph (KG) RAG architecture [36] consisting of two phases: pre-processing and inference.

Through a within-subjects study with 12 participants comparing SemanticCommit to a chat-with-document baseline (OpenAI Canvas), we find differences in workflow: half of our participants adopted a workflow of impact analysis when using SemanticCommit, where they would first flag conflicts without AI revisions then resolve conflicts locally, despite having access to a global revision feature.

We implement the back-end using a knowledge-graph (KG) RAG architecture [36] consisting of two phases: pre-processing and inference.

In order to minimize relevance assessment issues, we apply a PageRank-based relevance ranking over the KG, akin to HippoRAG [36].

We compare our end-to-end system against two simpler methods: (i) DropAllDocs, which adds all documents to the context for conflict classification; and (ii) InkSync [56] which generates a JSON list of string-replace operations.

We run end-to-end on our four eval datasets using GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini and report the mean ± stddev for accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scores for the three approaches in Figure 5.

We conducted a controlled within-subjects study with mixed methods, comparing SemanticCommit with a baseline interface.

Both the order of task assignment and tool assignment were counterbalanced and randomly assigned.

Before each task, participants received a tutorial on the assigned tool and were given five minutes to explore it using a test document.

Each condition had a time limit of 15 minutes, after which the participant completed a post-task survey.

In the post-task surveys, we collected self-reported NASA Task Load Index (TLX) scores, Likert-scale ratings for ease of use, and responses on how well the AI helped participants identify, understand, and resolve semantic conflicts.

For qualitative analysis, the first author performed open coding on participant responses and audio transcripts to identify themes, which were used to interpret the qualitative results.

To measure statistical significance, we used Mann–Whitney–Wilcoxon tests and report the p-values.

We iterated on prompts using ChainForge [5] by setting up an evaluation pipeline against our datasets, which allowed us to observe the effects of prompt changes and model choices.

Our explorations went through substantial iterations and prompt prototyping over a period of eight months, evolving in response to two pilot studies and progressing from a card-based interface to a list of texts.

We ran one pilot study with five users of our card-based interface, and a second with four users of a revised interface.

Four coauthors created the evals, and two coauthors manually double-checked all conflicts, a process that took several days.

With participant consent, we recorded audio and screen-casts, and participants were encouraged to think aloud.

These semantic conflicts require dedicated support to detect, visualize, and resolve. Semantic conflict resolution interfaces must go beyond visualizing what changes were made, to what changes could be made, where they should be made, and what the effects might be. This resembles feedforward: affordances that help the user foresee the impact of an action [67, 93].

Today with LLMs, we are less limited by this constraint, and solutions to the problem of human-machine communication might be better found in cybernetics theory [9] than static formalism.

This reflects the principle of feedforward [67, 93] in communication theory—"a needed prescription or plan for a feedback, to which the actual feedback may or may not confirm" [79]—where a communicator provides "the context of what one was planning to talk about" [64, p. 179-80] in order to "pre-test the impact of [its output]" on the listener [34, p. 65].