  Throughout a conversation, participants make choices that can orient the flow
of the interaction. Such choices are particularly salient in the consequential
domain of crisis counseling, where a difficulty for counselors is balancing
between two key objectives: advancing the conversation towards a resolution,
and empathetically addressing the crisis situation.
  In this work, we develop an unsupervised methodology to quantify how
counselors manage this balance. Our main intuition is that if an utterance can
only receive a narrow range of appropriate replies, then its likely aim is to
advance the conversation forwards, towards a target within that range.
Likewise, an utterance that can only appropriately follow a narrow range of
possible utterances is likely aimed backwards at addressing a specific
situation within that range. By applying this intuition, we can map each
utterance to a continuous orientation axis that captures the degree to which it
is intended to direct the flow of the conversation forwards or backwards.
  This unsupervised method allows us to characterize counselor behaviors in a
large dataset of crisis counseling conversations, where we show that known
counseling strategies intuitively align with this axis. We also illustrate how
our measure can be indicative of a conversation's progress, as well as its
effectiveness.
