Tal August

Young Investigator, Allen Institue for AI

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I am a Young Investigator (postdoc) at the Allen Institute for AI on the Semantic Scholar team and an incoming assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, starting Fall 2024. I recently finished my PhD at the Paul G. Allen School for Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, advised by Katharina Reinecke and Noah Smith. I study ways to adapt language styles to different people and I build tools to make language adaptation automatic. I refer to this work as language as design because I see language as the ubiquitous interface we use to communicate and my work as finding new ways of designing language better for different people. The long term goal of my research is to improve our communication with one another and with technology.

My CV: PDF.

Interested in working with me?

If you are interested in working with me, instead of emailing me please fill out this interest survey. This is the best way of getting in touch with me.

Ph.D. student applicants: I will be taking on new students in Fall 2024! If you are interest in HCI, NLP, communication, or reading and writing tools, I encourage you to apply to UIUC Computer Science and mention me in your application.

news

Jun 15, 2023 I will join the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an assistant professor, starting Fall 2024.
Jan 30, 2023 Excited to be returning to the Allen Institute for AI as a Young Investigator.
Oct 15, 2022 I defended my thesis!

selected publications

  1. August2023PaperPM.png
    Paper Plain: Making Medical Research Papers Approachable to Healthcare Consumers with Natural Language Processing
    Tal August, Lucy Lu Wang, Jonathan Bragg, and 3 more authors
    TOCHI, 2023
  2. Stokes2023CHI.png
    How Language Formality in Security and Privacy Interfaces Impacts Intended Compliance
    Jackson Stokes, Tal August, Robert A Marver, and 4 more authors
    CHI, 2023
  3. august2020writing.png
    Writing Strategies for Science Communication: Data and Computational Analysis
    Tal August, Lauren Kim, Katharina Reinecke, and 1 more author
    In EMNLP, 2020
  4. Clark2021AllT.png
    All That’s ‘Human’ Is Not Gold: Evaluating Human Evaluation of Generated Text
    Elizabeth Clark, Tal August, Sofia Serrano, and 3 more authors
    In ACL, 2021