Kazi Tasnim Zinat

Yuexi Chen, Yimin Xiao, Kazi Tasnim Zinat et al.

Understanding collaborative writing dynamics between native speakers (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS) is critical for enhancing collaboration quality and team inclusivity. In this paper, we partnered with communication researchers to develop visual analytics solutions for comparing NS and NNS behaviors in 162 writing sessions across 27 teams. The primary challenges in analyzing writing behaviors are data complexity and the uncertainties introduced by automated methods. In response, we present \textsc{COALA}, a novel visual analytics tool that improves model interpretability by displaying uncertainties in author clusters, generating behavior summaries using large language models, and visualizing writing-related actions at multiple granularities. We validated the effectiveness of \textsc{COALA} through user studies with domain experts (N=2+2) and researchers with relevant experience (N=8). We present the insights discovered by participants using \textsc{COALA}, suggest features for future AI-assisted collaborative writing tools, and discuss the broader implications for analyzing collaborative processes beyond writing.

Kazi Tasnim Zinat, Yun Zhou, Xiang Lyu et al.

Inferring causal relationships between event pairs in a temporal sequence is applicable in many domains such as healthcare, manufacturing, and transportation. Most existing work on causal inference primarily focuses on event types within the designated domain, without considering the impact of exogenous out-of-domain interventions. In real-world settings, these out-of-domain interventions can significantly alter causal dynamics. To address this gap, we propose a new causal framework to define average treatment effect (ATE), beyond independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data in classic Rubin's causal framework, to capture the causal relation shift between events of temporal process under out-of-domain intervention. We design an unbiased ATE estimator, and devise a Transformer-based neural network model to handle both long-range temporal dependencies and local patterns while integrating out-of-domain intervention information into process modeling. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines in ATE estimation and goodness-of-fit under out-of-domain-augmented point processes.