Building Robust and Scalable Intelligent Writing Assistants: Challenges and Opportunities Leveraging GenAI

Text revision is a complex, iterative process. It is no surprise that human writers are unable to simultaneously comprehend multiple demands and constraints of the task of text revision when producing well-written texts, as they are required to cover the content, follow linguistic norms, set the right tone, follow discourse conventions, etc. This presents a massive challenge and opportunity for intelligent writing assistants, which have undergone an enormous shift in their abilities in the past few years and months via large language models and human-feedback learning. In addition to the quality of editing suggestions, writing assistance has undergone a monumental shift in terms of being prescriptive systems to being human-feedback-driven, collaborative systems. However, writing assistants still lack in terms of their quality, personalization, and overall usability, limiting the value they provide to users. In this talk, I will present my research, challenges, and insights on building intelligent and interactive writing assistants for effective communication and navigating challenges pertaining to quality, personalization, and usability.