My research program is focused on better understanding the social and pragmatic nature of conversation, and using this understanding to build computational systems that can improve the efficacy of conversation between people, and between people and computers. In order to pursue these goals, I invoke approaches from computational discourse analysis and text mining, conversational agents, and computer supported collaborative learning. I ground my research in the fields of language technologies and human-computer interaction, and I am fortunate to work closely with students and post-docs from the CMU Language Technologies Institute and the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, as well as to direct a lab of my own, called TELEDIA.