December 21, 2020 What makes people good at having conversations? In a recent paper, Cornell researchers explored conversations on a crisis text service in order to figure out how to answer that question. “The problem we always came up with was that we never knew if the things we observed were correlations, or if they could actually provide useful information to inform how the platform assigns counselors,” said Justine Zhang, doctoral student in information science and first author of “Quantifying the Causal Effects of Conversational Tendencies.” The paper was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, held virtually Oct. 17-21.