Wait! There's a Way Out: A Decision Mechanism for Forecasting Conversational Derailment

Abstract: Forecasting conversational derailment is the task of predicting, as the conversation unfolds, whether it will eventually derail into personal attacks. Since forecasting models operate in an online fashion, they must decide whether to "trigger" an alert after each utterance--for example, to notify participants or a moderator that the conversation is at risk of derailing. Existing approaches make this decision solely based on the estimated likelihood of derailment given the preceding utterances, implicitly assuming that the conversation's future trajectory is fixed. As a result, they ignore the possibility of future recovery and incur an unnecessarily high rate of false positives. In this work we propose a method for decoupling the decision to trigger from derailment likelihood estimation. Our approach 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. We operationalize this insight with a deferral mechanism that uses forward-looking simulations to assess whether a tense moment admits plausible paths to recovery. Incorporating this mechanism into a state-of-the-art forecasting model substantially reduces false positives without sacrificing forecasting accuracy. More broadly, this work highlights the value of treating decision-making as a first-class component of forecasting systems.