In our era of rapid technological advancement, the research landscape for writing assistants has become increasingly fragmented across various research communities. We seek to address this challenge by proposing a design space as a structured way to examine and explore the multidimensional space of intelligent and interactive writing assistants. Through a large community collaboration, we explore five aspects of writing assistants: task, user, technology, interaction, and ecosystem. Within each aspect, we define dimensions (i.e., fundamental components of an aspect) and codes (i.e., potential options for each dimension) by systematically reviewing 115 papers. Our design space aims to offer researchers and designers a practical tool to navigate, comprehend, and compare the various possibilities of writing assistants, and aid in the envisioning and design of new writing assistants.

Despite the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) as writing assistants, they are plagued by issues like coherence and fluency of the model output, trustworthiness, ownership of the generated content, and predictability of model performance, thereby limiting their usability. In this position paper, we propose to adopt Norman's seven stages of action as a framework to approach the interaction design of intelligent writing assistants. We illustrate the framework's applicability to writing tasks by providing an example of software tutorial authoring. The paper also discusses the framework as a tool to synthesize research on the interaction design of LLM-based tools and presents examples of tools that support the stages of action. Finally, we briefly outline the potential of a framework for human-LLM interaction research.

The documentation practice for machine-learned (ML) models often falls short of established practices for traditional software, which impedes model accountability and inadvertently abets inappropriate or misuse of models. Recently, model cards, a proposal for model documentation, have attracted notable attention, but their impact on the actual practice is unclear. In this work, we systematically study the model documentation in the field and investigate how to encourage more responsible and accountable documentation practice. Our analysis of publicly available model cards reveals a substantial gap between the proposal and the practice. We then design a tool named DocML aiming to (1) nudge the data scientists to comply with the model cards proposal during the model development, especially the sections related to ethics, and (2) assess and manage the documentation quality. A lab study reveals the benefit of our tool towards long-term documentation quality and accountability.