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PersonaMail: Learning and Adapting Personal Communication Preferences for Context-Aware Email Writing

Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary WorksRGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication)peer-review

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Abstract

LLM-assisted writing has seen rapid adoption in interpersonal communication, yet current systems often fail to capture the subtle tones essential for effectiveness. Email writing exemplifies this challenge: effective messages require careful alignment with intent, relationship, and context beyond mere fluency. Through formative studies, we identified three key challenges: articulating nuanced communicative intent, making modifications at multiple levels of granularity, and reusing effective tone strategies across messages. We developed PersonaMail, a system that addresses these gaps through structured communication factor exploration, granular editing controls, and adaptive reuse of successful strategies. Our evaluation compared PersonaMail against standard LLM interfaces, and showed improved efficiency in both immediate and repeated use, alongside higher user satisfaction. We contribute design implications for AI-assisted communication systems that prioritize interpersonal nuance over generic text generation. © 2026 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationIUI'26
Subtitle of host publicationProceedings of the 2026 Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages197-217
Number of pages21
ISBN (Print)9798400719844
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2026
Event31st International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2026) - Paphos, Cyprus
Duration: 23 Mar 202626 Mar 2026

Publication series

NameInternational Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Proceedings IUI

Conference

Conference31st International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2026)
PlaceCyprus
CityPaphos
Period23/03/2626/03/26

Funding

This work was (partially) supported by the Start-up Grant from City University of Hong Kong (Project No. 9610677).

Research Keywords

  • adaptive interfaces
  • AI-assisted writing
  • email composition
  • human-AI collaboration
  • interpersonal communication
  • large language models
  • tone customization

Publisher's Copyright Statement

  • This full text is made available under CC-BY 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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