PRESENT
Associate Professor, Department of Information Science, Cornell University
RESEARCH FOCUS
Models of Conversational Behavior
NEWS
I am looking for PhD students. If you are passionate about the topics listed above, apply to the Cornell CS / IS PhD programs and mention how our interests align. I will read your application and reach out with any questions. (No need to email me separately.)
Our ConvoWizard
tool was featured on NPR's
Weekend Edition
Released the Cornell Conversational Analysis Toolkit (ConvoKit 3.0), now with database support!
More DATA, MEDIA COVERAGE, TALKS and older NEWS
INVITED TALKS
Keynote at the ACL Workshop on Human-Centered Large Language Modeling, August 15, 2024
INTERACTIVE FUN
Guess whether a conversation will go awry
Check how polite your requests are using our Politeness Web App
Check out how Obama was quoted in our QUOTUS interactive visualization
TEACHING
Fall 2024: NLP and Social Interaction (INFO/CS 6742)
Spring 2025: Language and Information (INFO/CS 4300)
Check out the 4300 Projects Hall of Fame
PUBLICATIONS
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.
Jonathan P. Chang, Charlotte Schluger and Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
Proceedings of CSCW 2022.
Charlotte Schluger, Jonathan P. Chang, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and Karen Levy
Proceedings of CSCW 2022.
Facilitating the Communication of Politeness through Fine-Grained Paraphrasing
Liye Fu, Susan Fussell and Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
Proceedings of EMNLP 2020.
Quantifying the Causal Effects of Conversational Tendencies
Justine Zhang, Sendhil Mullainathan, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
Proceedings of CSCW 2020.
ConvoKit: A Toolkit for the Analysis of Conversations
Jonathan P. Chang, Caleb Chiam, Liye Fu, Andrew Z. Wang, Justine Zhang, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
Proceedings of SIGDIAL 2020. System demo.
Balancing Objectives in Counseling Conversations: Advancing Forwards or Looking Backwards
Justine Zhang and Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
Proceedings of ACL 2020.
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.
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.
Confidence Boost in Dyadic Online Teamwork: An Individual-Focused Perspective
Liye Fu*, Andrew Z. Wang*, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
Proceedings of ICWSM 2020.
*Equal contributions
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.
Kumar Srinivasan, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Lillian Lee, Chenhao Tan
Proceedings of CSCW 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.
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.
Trajectories of Blocked Community Members: Redemption, Recidivism and Departure
Jonathan P. Chang and Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil.
Proceedings of WWW 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.
WikiConv: A Corpus of the Complete Conversational History of a Large Online Collaborative Community
Yiqing Hua, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Dario Taraborelli,
Nithum Thain, Jeffery Sorensen, Lucas Dixon.
Proceedings of EMNLP 2018. Short Paper.
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.
Community Identity and User Engagement in a Multi-Community Landscape
Justine Zhang*, Will Hamilton*, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Dan Jurafsky and Jure Leskovec
Proceedings of ICWSM 2017.
*Equal contributions
Tracing the Use of Practices through Networks of Collaboration
Rahmtin Rotabi, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jon Kleinberg
Proceedings of ICWSM 2017.
Will Hamilton*, Justine Zhang*, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Dan Jurafsky and Jure Leskovec
Proceedings of ICWSM 2017. Short Paper.
*Equal contributions
When Confidence and Competence Collide: Effects on Online Decision-Making Discussions
Liye Fu, Lillian Lee, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
Proceedings of WWW, 2017.
Competition and Selection Among Conventions
Rahmtin Rotabi, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jon Kleinberg
Proceedings of WWW, 2017.
Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions
Justin Cheng, Michael Bernstein, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jure Leskovec
Proceedings of CSCW, 2017.
Best Paper Award.
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.
Message impartiality in social media discussions
Muhammad Bilal Zafar, Krishna Gummadi, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
Proceedings of ICWSM, 2016.
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.
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
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.
QUOTUS: The Structure of Political Media Coverage as Revealed by Quoting Patterns
Vlad Niculae*, Caroline Suen*, Justine Zhang*, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jure Leskovec
Proceedings of WWW, 2015.
*Equal contributions
Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities
Justin Cheng, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jure Leskovec
Proceedings of ICWSM, 2015.
Honorable Mention
Brighter than Gold: Figurative Language in User Generated Comparisons
Vlad Niculae and Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
Proceedings of EMNLP, 2014.
People on Drugs: Credibility of User Statements in Health Communities
Subhabrata Mukherjee, Gerhard Weikum, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
Proceedings of KDD, 2014.
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.
How Community Feedback Shapes User Behavior
Justin Cheng, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jure Leskovec
Proceedings of ICWSM, 2014.
No country for old members: User lifecycle and linguistic change in online communities
Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Robert West, Dan Jurafsky, Jure Leskovec, Christopher Potts
Proceedings
of WWW, 2013.
Best Paper Award
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
Linguistic Models for Analyzing and Detecting Biased Language
Marta Recasens, Cristian
Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Dan Jurafsky
Proceedings of ACL, 2013.
Characterizing and Curating Conversation Threads: Expansion, Focus, Volume, Re-entry
Lars Backstrom, Jon Kleinberg, Lillian Lee, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
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.
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.
Mark my words! Linguistic style accommodation in social media.
Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Michael Gamon and Susan Dumais.
Proceedings of WWW, 2011.
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.
Competing for users' attention: On the interplay between organic and sponsored search results.
Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Andrei Broder, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Vanja Josifovski, Bo Pang.
Proceedings of WWW, 2010.
Don't ‘have a clue’? Unsupervised co-learning of downward-entailing operators.
Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and Lillian Lee
Proceedings of ACL, 2010. Short paper.
For the sake of simplicity: Experiments with unsupervised extraction of lexical simplifications.
Mark Yatskar, Bo Pang, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Lillian Lee.
Proceedings of NAACL HLT, 2010. Short paper.
Without a ‘doubt’? Unsupervised discovery of downward-entailing operators.
Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Lillian Lee and Richard Ducott.
Proceedings of NAACL HLT, 2009.
How opinions are received by online communities: A case study on Amazon.com helpfulness votes.
Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Gueorgi Kossinets, Jon Kleinberg and Lillian Lee.
Proceedings of WWW, 2009.
RESEARCH GROUPS
PhD and MS students (in chronological order):
Jonathan P. Chang, recipient of the CCSS Data Science Fellowship
Ph.D. 2024 → Assistant Professor at Harvey Mudd
Thesis: Towards Computational Methods for Proactively Supporting Healthier Online Discussions
Liye Fu, co-recipient of Best Paper Award at the IJCAI workshop on NLP meets Journalism
Ph.D. 2021 → Research Scientist at Thompson Reuters
Thesis: Intentions and Perceptions in Technology-Mediated Communication
Justine Zhang, recipient of Microsoft PhD Fellowship
Ph.D. 2021 → Assistant Professor at University of Michigan (deferred for a one-year postdoc at Stanford)
Thesis: Towards Actionable Understandings of Conversations: A Computational Approach
Photo credit: Jane Walker
CONTACT
Office hours: you can make an appointment here
Cornell University
209 Gates Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
USA
Physical location in Google Maps
Room 209