486 citations · 2.3k across the 40 of their papers we have counts for
43 papers
Adapting from Downturns: Prediction of Long-Term Conversational-Skill Development in Mental-Health Crisis Counselors
Vivian Nguyen, Lillian Lee, Elizabeth A. Olson +1
How do people learn to become better conversationalists? This question is especially important in the context of mental-health counseling, where conversational skills are essential…
Hanging in the Balance: Pivotal Moments in Crisis Counseling Conversations
Vivian Nguyen, Lillian Lee, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
During a conversation, there can come certain moments where its outcome hangs in the balance. In these pivotal moments, how one responds can put the conversation on substantially d…
Time is On My Side: Dynamics of Talk-Time Sharing in Video-chat Conversations
Kaixiang Zhang, Justine Zhang, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
An intrinsic aspect of every conversation is the way talk-time is shared between multiple speakers. Conversations can be balanced, with each speaker claiming a similar amount of ta…
Taking a turn for the better: Conversation redirection throughout the course of mental-health therapy
Vivian Nguyen, Sang Min Jung, Lillian Lee +2
Mental-health therapy involves a complex conversation flow in which patients and therapists continuously negotiate what should be talked about next. For example, therapists might t…
Thread With Caution: Proactively Helping Users Assess and Deescalate Tension in Their Online Discussions
Jonathan P. Chang, Charlotte Schluger, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
Incivility remains a major challenge for online discussion platforms, to such an extent that even conversations between well-intentioned users can often derail into uncivil behavio…
Proactive Moderation of Online Discussions: Existing Practices and the Potential for Algorithmic Support
Charlotte Schluger, Jonathan P. Chang, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil +1
To address the widespread problem of uncivil behavior, many online discussion platforms employ human moderators to take action against objectionable content, such as removing it or…
ConvoKit: A Toolkit for the Analysis of Conversations
Jonathan P. Chang, Caleb Chiam, Liye Fu +3
This paper describes the design and functionality of ConvoKit, an open-source toolkit for analyzing conversations and the social interactions embedded within. ConvoKit provides an…
Balancing Objectives in Counseling Conversations: Advancing Forwards or Looking Backwards
Justine Zhang, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
Throughout a conversation, participants make choices that can orient the flow of the interaction. Such choices are particularly salient in the consequential domain of crisis counse…
Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood: Comparing Intentions and Perceptions in Online Discussions
Jonathan P. Chang, Justin Cheng, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
Discourse involves two perspectives: a person's intention in making an utterance and others' perception of that utterance. The misalignment between these perspectives can lead to u…
Content Removal as a Moderation Strategy: Compliance and Other Outcomes in the ChangeMyView Community
Kumar Bhargav Srinivasan, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Lillian Lee +1
Moderators of online communities often employ comment deletion as a tool. We ask here whether, beyond the positive effects of shielding a community from undesirable content, does c…
Trouble on the Horizon: Forecasting the Derailment of Online Conversations as they Develop
Jonathan P. Chang, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
Online discussions often derail into toxic exchanges between participants. Recent efforts mostly focused on detecting antisocial behavior after the fact, by analyzing single commen…
Finding Your Voice: The Linguistic Development of Mental Health Counselors
Justine Zhang, Robert Filbin, Christine Morrison +2
Mental health counseling is an enterprise with profound societal importance where conversations play a primary role. In order to acquire the conversational skills needed to face a…
Asking the Right Question: Inferring Advice-Seeking Intentions from Personal Narratives
Liye Fu, Jonathan P. Chang, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
People often share personal narratives in order to seek advice from others. To properly infer the narrator's intention, one needs to apply a certain degree of common sense and soci…
Trajectories of Blocked Community Members: Redemption, Recidivism and Departure
Jonathan P. Chang, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
Community norm violations can impair constructive communication and collaboration online. As a defense mechanism, community moderators often address such transgressions by temporar…
WikiConv: A Corpus of the Complete Conversational History of a Large Online Collaborative Community
Yiqing Hua, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Dario Taraborelli +3
We present a corpus that encompasses the complete history of conversations between contributors to Wikipedia, one of the largest online collaborative communities. By recording the…
Conversations Gone Awry: Detecting Early Signs of Conversational Failure
Justine Zhang, Jonathan P. Chang, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil +4
One of the main challenges online social systems face is the prevalence of antisocial behavior, such as harassment and personal attacks. In this work, we introduce the task of pred…
Asking Too Much? The Rhetorical Role of Questions in Political Discourse
Justine Zhang, Arthur Spirling, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
Questions play a prominent role in social interactions, performing rhetorical functions that go beyond that of simple informational exchange. The surface form of a question can sig…
Community Identity and User Engagement in a Multi-Community Landscape
Justine Zhang, William L. Hamilton, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil +2
A community's identity defines and shapes its internal dynamics. Our current understanding of this interplay is mostly limited to glimpses gathered from isolated studies of individ…
People on Drugs: Credibility of User Statements in Health Communities
Subhabrata Mukherjee, Gerhard Weikum, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
Online health communities are a valuable source of information for patients and physicians. However, such user-generated resources are often plagued by inaccuracies and misinformat…
Tracing the Use of Practices through Networks of Collaboration
Rahmtin Rotabi, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jon Kleinberg
An active line of research has used on-line data to study the ways in which discrete units of information---including messages, photos, product recommendations, group invitations--…
Competition and Selection Among Conventions
Rahmtin Rotabi, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jon Kleinberg
In many domains, a latent competition among different conventions determines which one will come to dominate. One sees such effects in the success of community jargon, of competing…
When confidence and competence collide: Effects on online decision-making discussions
Liye Fu, Lillian Lee, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
Group discussions are a way for individuals to exchange ideas and arguments in order to reach better decisions than they could on their own. One of the premises of productive discu…
Loyalty in Online Communities
William L. Hamilton, Justine Zhang, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil +2
Loyalty is an essential component of multi-community engagement. When users have the choice to engage with a variety of different communities, they often become loyal to just one,…
Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions
Justin Cheng, Michael Bernstein, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil +1
In online communities, antisocial behavior such as trolling disrupts constructive discussion. While prior work suggests that trolling behavior is confined to a vocal and antisocial…