Conversations gone awry: detecting warning signs of conversational failure

One of the main challenges online social systems face today is the prevalence of toxic behavior, such as harassment and personal attacks. This type of antisocial behavior is especially perplexing and disruptive when it emerges in the context of healthy conversations where, at least in principle, participants share a common goal and set of norms. In this work, we introduce the task of predicting whether a given conversation is on the verge of being derailed by the antisocial actions of one of its participants. As opposed to detecting toxic behavior after the fact, this task aims to enable early, actionable information at a time when the conversation might still be salvaged.