MODELS OF CONVERSATIONAL BEHAVIOR
Modeling Conversations and their Social Context
Collaboration, Debating, Persuasion, Pragmatics, etc.
KEY PUBLICATIONS
Hanging in the Balance: Pivotal Moments in Crisis Counseling Conversations
Vivian Nguyen, Lillian Lee, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
Proceedings of ACL 2025. Vivian Nguyen, Sang Min Jung, Lillian Lee, Thomas D. Hull, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil Proceedings of EMNLP 2024 (Findings). How did we get here? Summarizing conversation dynamics Yilun Hua, Nick Chernogor, Yuzhe Gu, Seoyeon Julie Jeong, Miranda Luo, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil Proceedings of NAACL 2024. Quantifying the Causal Effects of Conversational Tendencies Justine Zhang, Sendhil Mullainathan, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil Proceedings of CSCW 2020. Balancing Objectives in Counseling Conversations: Advancing Forwards or Looking Backwards Justine Zhang and Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil Proceedings of ACL 2020. Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood: Comparing Intentions and Perceptions in Online Discussions Jonathan P. Chang, Justin Cheng, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil. Proceedings of WWW 2020. Trouble on the Horizon: Forecasting the Derailment of Online Conversations as they Develop Jonathan P. Chang and Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil. Proceedings of EMNLP 2019. Finding Your Voice: The Linguistic Development of Mental Health Counselors Justine Zhang, Robert Filbin, Christine Morrison, Jaclyn Weiser, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil Proceedings of ACL 2019. Characterizing Online Public Discussions Through Patterns of Participant Interactions Justine Zhang, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Christina Sauper, Sean J. Taylor Proceedings of CSCW 2018. Conversations Gone Awry: Detecting Early Signs of Conversational Failure Justine Zhang, Jonathan P. Chang, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Lucas Dixon, Yiqing Hua, Nithum Thain, Dario Taraborelli Proceedings of ACL 2018. Asking Too Much? The Rhetorical Role of Questions in Political Discourse Justine Zhang, Arthur Spirling, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil Proceedings of EMNLP 2017. When Confidence and Competence Collide: Effects on Online Decision-Making Discussions Liye Fu, Lillian Lee, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil Proceedings of WWW, 2017. Conversational Markers of Constructive Discussions Vlad Niculae and Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil Proceedings of NAACL, 2016. Conversational flow in Oxford-style debates Justine Zhang, Ravi Kumar, Sujith Ravi, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil Proceedings of NAACL, 2016. Short paper. Winning arguments: Interaction dynamics and persuasion strategies in good-faith online discussions Chenhao Tan, Vlad Niculae, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Lillian Lee Proceedings of WWW, 2016. Linguistic Harbingers of Betrayal: A Case Study on an Online Strategy Game Vlad Niculae, Srijan Kumar, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil Proceedings of ACL, 2015. A computational approach to politeness with application to social factors Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Moritz Sudhof, Dan Jurafsky, Jure Leskovec, Christopher Potts Proceedings of ACL, 2013. Nominated for the Best Paper Award Echoes of power: Language effects and power differences in social interaction Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Lillian Lee, Bo Pang and Jon Kleinberg. Proceedings of WWW, 2012. Mark my words! Linguistic style accommodation in social media. Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Michael Gamon and Susan Dumais. Proceedings of WWW, 2011. RELEVANT PUBLICATIONS ConvoKit: A Toolkit for the Analysis of Conversations Jonathan P. Chang, Caleb Chiam, Liye Fu, Andrew Wang, Justine Zhang, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil Proceedings of SIGDIAL 2020. System Demos. It Takes Two to Lie: One to Lie, and One to Listen Denis Peskov, Benny Cheng, Ahmed Elgohary, Joe Barrow, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and Jordan Boyd-Graber Proceedings of ACL 2020. Short paper. Asking the Right Question: Inferring Advice-Seeking Intentions from Personal Narratives Liye Fu, Jonathan P. Chang and Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil. Proceedings of NAACL 2019. Characterizing and Curating Conversation Threads: Expansion, Focus, Volume, Re-entry Lars Backstrom, Jon Kleinberg, Lillian Lee, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil Chameleons in Imagined Conversations: A new Approach to Understanding Coordination of Linguistic Style in Dialogs. Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and Lillian Lee. Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, 2011. How to Ask for a Favor: A Case Study on the Success of Altruistic Requests Tim Althoff, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Dan Jurafsky Proceedings of ICWSM, 2014. Message impartiality in social media discussions Muhammad Bilal Zafar, Krishna Gummadi, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil Proceedings of ICWSM, 2016. Tie-breaker: Using language models to quantify gender bias in sports journalism Liye Fu, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Lillian Lee Proceedings of the IJCAI workshop on NLP meets Journalism, 2016. Best Paper Award People on Drugs: Credibility of User Statements in Health Communities Subhabrata Mukherjee, Gerhard Weikum, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil Proceedings of KDD, 2014. You had me at hello: How phrasing affects memorability Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Justin Cheng, Jon Kleinberg and Lillian Lee. Proceedings of ACL, 2012. A computational approach to linguistic coordination Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil Ph.D. Thesis, Cornell University, 2012. RELEVANT CODE ConvoKit: Toolkit for analyzing conversations (coordination, politeness, rhetorical intentions) Code for extracting simple linguistic features from conversations RELEVANT DATA Intelligence Squared Debate Dataset Dataset of tennis post-game interviews Interactions in online Diplomacy games Wikipedia Talk Page Conversations Corpus MEDIA COVERAGE Our work on winning arguments was features on the You Are Not So Smart podcast Our work on winning arguments was covered by Washington Post, New York Magazine and others Our tie-breaker paper was covered by Pacific Standard Magazine Our work on betrayal was featured in the The Wall Street Journal Our work on betrayal was covered by Science News, CNN, New York Magazine and others Our conversation threads paper was mentioned in The New York Times Our How to Ask for a Favor paper was featured in Huffington Post and other media outlets Our memorability paper was featured in The New York Times Our memorability paper was featured in New Scientist, NPR and other media outlets Our Echoes of Power paper was featured in MIT’s Technology Review blog Our work on linguistic coordination in movie dialogs was featured on Nature.com