Koen Hindriks
2026
SciText2Eq: Assessing LLMs for Explainable Equation Generation for Scientific Creativity
Yifan Mo | Xiao Fu | Yue Su | Qingyu Meng | Koen Hindriks | Qingzhi Liu | Jiahuan Pei
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yifan Mo | Xiao Fu | Yue Su | Qingyu Meng | Koen Hindriks | Qingzhi Liu | Jiahuan Pei
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
This work investigates the ability of large language models (LLMs) to generate mathematical equations from scientific texts. Prior work faces challenges in unstructured grounding, multi-equation dependency, and human-aligned evaluation. To address this, we construct a dataset of AI research papers, pairing contextual passages with ground-truth equations and variable descriptions. We develop an explainable equation generation workflow and evaluate it across diverse open- and closed-source LLMs. Our evaluation protocol combines automatic metrics, LLM-based rubrics, and human judgments to assess accuracy, explainability, and human-LLM alignment. Results show that LLMs achieve moderate performance on lexical and syntactic similarity, but struggle with semantic accuracy. LLM-based evaluations show limited alignment with human judgments, highlighting challenges in assessing equation quality. These findings provide insights for improving equation generation models and developing more reliable evaluation methods for scientific creativity. We provide code and data for reproducibility.
StoryMI: Steerable Multi-Agent Therapeutic Dialogue Generation
Qingyu Meng | Min Chen | Dingming Liu | Yifan Mo | Yue Su | Xin Sun | Koen Hindriks | Jiahuan Pei
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Qingyu Meng | Min Chen | Dingming Liu | Yifan Mo | Yue Su | Xin Sun | Koen Hindriks | Jiahuan Pei
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent dialogue, but prior works lack situational grounding, dynamic strategy control, and evaluation aligned with clinical standards in motivational interviewing (MI). We introduce StoryMI, a multi-LLM agent framework for controllable MI dialogue generation, where questionnaire-based client profiles are expanded into situational stories that provide narrative context for the dialogue. Therapist and client agents generate MI-coded utterances guided by MI codes selected by the interaction agent, while an interaction agent dynamically coordinates exchanges to control MI strategies during a multi-turn conversation. We propose a two-level evaluation protocol: lexical metrics and MI-specific measures of macro-level counseling strategies, alongside LLM-as-judge and human expert assessments. We construct a dataset of 6K simulated MI dialogues grounded in 1K questionnaire-story pairs, covering 12 MI codes and 13 symptom domains, and benchmark six open- and closed-source LLMs. Our results show that situational grounding and macro-level control can improve MI adherence and clinical plausibility, demonstrating the effectiveness of a structured multi-agent workflow for psychotherapy dialogue generation. We provide code and data for reproducibility.
2025
Conversational Education at Scale: A Multi-LLM Agent Workflow for Procedural Learning and Pedagogic Quality Assessment
Jiahuan Pei | Fanghua Ye | Xin Sun | Wentao Deng | Koen Hindriks | Junxiao Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Jiahuan Pei | Fanghua Ye | Xin Sun | Wentao Deng | Koen Hindriks | Junxiao Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Large language models (LLMs) have advanced virtual educators and learners, bridging NLP with AI4Education. Existing work often lacks scalability and fails to leverage diverse, large-scale course content, with limited frameworks for assessing pedagogic quality. To this end, we propose WikiHowAgent, a multi-agent workflow leveraging LLMs to simulate interactive teaching-learning conversations. It integrates teacher and learner agents, an interaction manager, and an evaluator to facilitate procedural learning and assess pedagogic quality. We introduce a dataset of 114,296 teacher-learner conversations grounded in 14,287 tutorials across 17 domains and 727 topics. Our evaluation protocol combines computational and rubric-based metrics with human judgment alignment. Results demonstrate the workflow’s effectiveness in diverse setups, offering insights into LLM capabilities across domains. Our datasets and implementations are fully open-sourced.