Papers by Vivian Nguyen
Wait! There’s a Way Out: A Decision Mechanism for Forecasting Conversational Derailment (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches make decision to "trigger" based on the estimated likelihood of derailment given the preceding utterances, implicitly assuming that the conversation’s future trajectory is fixed. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for decoupling the decision to trigger from derailment likelihood estimation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is inspired by the first human baseline on this task, which shows that humans achieve dramatically lower false positive rates by selectively deferring their decision to trigger when they anticipate that tension is likely to subside. |
Hanging in the Balance: Pivotal Moments in Crisis Counseling Conversations (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | During a conversation, there can come certain moments where its outcome hangs in the balance. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised computational method for detecting pivotal moments as they happen. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method aligns with human perception and the eventual conversational trajectory, which is more likely to change course at these moments. |
Taking a turn for the better: Conversation redirection throughout the course of mental-health therapy (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Mental-health therapy involves a complex conversation flow in which patients and therapists continuously negotiate what should be talked about next. |
| Approach: | They propose a measure to quantify the extent to which a certain utterance immediately redirects the flow of the conversation in a large, widely-used online therapy platform. |
| Outcome: | The proposed measure measures the extent to which a certain utterance immediately redirects the flow of the conversation over multiple sessions in a large, widely-used online therapy platform. |