486 citations · 2.3k across the 40 of their papers we have counts for
27 papers · 1 filter
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Tie-breaker: Using language models to quantify gender bias in sports journalism
Liye Fu, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Lillian Lee
Gender bias is an increasingly important issue in sports journalism. In this work, we propose a language-model-based approach to quantify differences in questions posed to female v…
Conversational Markers of Constructive Discussions
Vlad Niculae, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
Group discussions are essential for organizing every aspect of modern life, from faculty meetings to senate debates, from grant review panels to papal conclaves. While costly in te…
Conversational flow in Oxford-style debates
Justine Zhang, Ravi Kumar, Sujith Ravi +1
Public debates are a common platform for presenting and juxtaposing diverging views on important issues. In this work we propose a methodology for tracking how ideas flow between p…
Linguistic Harbingers of Betrayal: A Case Study on an Online Strategy Game
Vlad Niculae, Srijan Kumar, Jordan Boyd-Graber +1
Interpersonal relations are fickle, with close friendships often dissolving into enmity. In this work, we explore linguistic cues that presage such transitions by studying dyadic i…
QUOTUS: The Structure of Political Media Coverage as Revealed by Quoting Patterns
Vlad Niculae, Caroline Suen, Justine Zhang +2
Given the extremely large pool of events and stories available, media outlets need to focus on a subset of issues and aspects to convey to their audience. Outlets are often accused…
How to Ask for a Favor: A Case Study on the Success of Altruistic Requests
Tim Althoff, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Dan Jurafsky
Requests are at the core of many social media systems such as question & answer sites and online philanthropy communities. While the success of such requests is critical to the suc…
A Computational Approach to Politeness with Application to Social Factors
Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Moritz Sudhof, Dan Jurafsky +2
We propose a computational framework for identifying linguistic aspects of politeness. Our starting point is a new corpus of requests annotated for politeness, which we use to eval…
Hedge detection as a lens on framing in the GMO debates: A position paper
Eunsol Choi, Chenhao Tan, Lillian Lee +2
Understanding the ways in which participants in public discussions frame their arguments is important in understanding how public opinion is formed. In this paper, we adopt the pos…
You had me at hello: How phrasing affects memorability
Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Justin Cheng, Jon Kleinberg +1
Understanding the ways in which information achieves widespread public awareness is a research question of significant interest. We consider whether, and how, the way in which the…
Chameleons in imagined conversations: A new approach to understanding coordination of linguistic style in dialogs
Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Lillian Lee
Conversational participants tend to immediately and unconsciously adapt to each other's language styles: a speaker will even adjust the number of articles and other function words…
For the sake of simplicity: Unsupervised extraction of lexical simplifications from Wikipedia
Mark Yatskar, Bo Pang, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil +1
We report on work in progress on extracting lexical simplifications (e.g., "collaborate" -> "work together"), focusing on utilizing edit histories in Simple English Wikipedia for t…