TreeWriter: AI-Assisted Hierarchical Planning and Writing for Long-Form Documents
🤖 AI Summary
Existing intelligent writing tools struggle to maintain coherence, enable efficient planning, and support effective human-AI collaboration in long-form document creation. This work proposes TreeWriter, a hierarchical writing system that models documents as multi-level editable trees, facilitating end-to-end composition from high-level ideation to fine-grained refinement. By integrating context-aware AI agents, dynamic content loading, and hierarchical navigation, TreeWriter delivers precise editing suggestions across varying granularities while balancing automation with user control. A user study demonstrates that, compared to Google Docs paired with Gemini, TreeWriter significantly enhances creative exploration efficiency, the effectiveness of AI assistance, and the sense of authorial agency. Furthermore, a two-month field deployment confirms its utility in supporting collaborative writing workflows.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
Long documents pose many challenges to current intelligent writing systems. These include maintaining consistency across sections, sustaining efficient planning and writing as documents become more complex, and effectively providing and integrating AI assistance to the user. Existing AI co-writing tools offer either inline suggestions or limited structured planning, but rarely support the entire writing process that begins with high-level ideas and ends with polished prose, in which many layers of planning and outlining are needed. Here, we introduce TreeWriter, a hierarchical writing system that represents documents as trees and integrates contextual AI support. TreeWriter allows authors to create, save, and refine document outlines at multiple levels, facilitating drafting, understanding, and iterative editing of long documents. A built-in AI agent can dynamically load relevant content, navigate the document hierarchy, and provide context-aware editing suggestions. A within-subject study (N=12) comparing TreeWriter with Google Docs + Gemini on long-document editing and creative writing tasks shows that TreeWriter improves idea exploration/development, AI helpfulness, and perceived authorial control. A two-month field deployment (N=8) further demonstrated that hierarchical organization supports collaborative writing. Our findings highlight the potential of hierarchical, tree-structured editors with integrated AI support and provide design guidelines for future AI-assisted writing tools that balance automation with user agency.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
long-form documents
AI-assisted writing
hierarchical planning
writing consistency
document structure
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
hierarchical writing
tree-structured document
AI-assisted co-writing
context-aware editing
long-form document
🔎 Similar Papers
No similar papers found.
