12:00–1:30 pm
DSI 105 5460 S University Ave., Chicago IL, 60615
Lillian Lee
Charles Roy Davis Professor of Computer Science
Cornell University
Title: Taking a turn for the better? Pivoting and pivotal moments in consequential conversations
Abstract: So much of human interaction occurs as conversations, and it is both fascinating and imperative to analyze them. Recently, my co-authors and I have turned to texting-based conversations between mental-health therapists or crisis counselors and their clients, seeking to identify “key” moments in these exchanges:
(1) A “pivoting” moment corresponds to a *redirection* of the conversation introduced by one party that is accepted/followed by the other. We develop a probabilistic measure of how much an utterance immediately redirects the flow of the conversation, accounting for both the intention and the actual realization of such a change.
(2) In a *pivotal* moment, the conversation’s outcome hangs in the balance: how one responds can put the conversation on substantially diverging trajectories leading to significantly different results. We formalize this intuition by estimating the variance in expectation of outcome depending on what might be said next.
We find significant correlates of our measures in real human conversations on widely-used platforms. For example, the patients in our longer-term mental-health-therapy data who redirected less in their first few sessions were significantly more likely to eventually express dissatisfaction with their therapist and terminate the relationship; and the staff responses in our crisis-counseling data had greater estimated impact on disengagement rates during pivotal moments than in non-.
Joint work with Vivian Nguyen, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Thomas D. Hull, and Sang Min (Dave) Jung.
Bio: Lillian Lee is the Charles Roy Davis professor of computer science at Cornell University. Her research interests include natural language processing and computational social science. She is a AAAI Fellow, an ACL Fellow, and an ACM Fellow. She is a recipient of best paper awards at NAACL 2004 (joint with Regina Barzilay), the IJCAI 2016 “Natural Language Processing Meets Journalism” workshop (joint with Liye Fu and Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil), and ACL 2023 (one of three, with Jack Hessel, Ana Marasović, Jena Hwang, Jeff Da, Rowan Zellers, Bob Mankoff, and Yejin Choi); one of three inaugural (2018) NAACL awards for the Test of Time (2002-2012) Paper on Computational Linguistics (joint with Bo Pang) and the 25-year Test of Time award at ACL 2024; and the ACL 2021 Distinguished Service Award for her work with TACL. Her co-authored work has received several mentions in the popular press, including The New York Times, NPR’s All Things Considered, and NBC’s The Today Show; and one of her co-authored papers on the memorability of movie quotes was publicly called “boring” by YouTubers Rhett and Link in a video viewed over 2.7 million times.