# PLACES: Prompting Language Models for Social Conversation Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.03269 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03269/

## Key facts

- Cited by 72 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00027/) (2020)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [Fantastically Ordered Prompts and Where to Find Them: Overcoming Few-Shot Prompt Order Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08786/) (2021)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [DailyDialog: A Manually Labelled Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03957/) (2017)
- [MELD: A Multimodal Multi-Party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02508/) (2018)
- [Recipes for building an open-domain chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13637/) (2020)
- [MetaICL: Learning to Learn In Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15943/) (2021)
- [The Pushshift Reddit Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08435/) (2020)
- [Generating Training Data with Language Models: Towards Zero-Shot Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04538/) (2022)
- [BlenderBot 3: a deployed conversational agent that continually learns to responsibly engage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03188/) (2022)
- [Build it Break it Fix it for Dialogue Safety: Robustness from Adversarial Human Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06083/) (2019)
- [The Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus: A Large Dataset for Research in Unstructured Multi-Turn Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.08909/) (2015)
- [SODA: Million-scale Dialogue Distillation with Social Commonsense Contextualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10465/) (2022)
- [NeuroLogic Decoding: (Un)supervised Neural Text Generation with Predicate Logic Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12884/) (2020)
- [Dialogue Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00671/) (2018)
- [Can You Put it All Together: Evaluating Conversational Agents' Ability to Blend Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08449/) (2020)
- [Few-Shot Bot: Prompt-Based Learning for Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08118/) (2021)
- [Grounded Conversation Generation as Guided Traverses in Commonsense Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02707/) (2019)
- [Low-Resource Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10348/) (2020)
- [PromDA: Prompt-based Data Augmentation for Low-Resource NLU Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12499/) (2022)
- [GODEL: Large-Scale Pre-Training for Goal-Directed Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11309/) (2022)
- [Data Augmentation for Intent Classification with Off-the-shelf Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01959/) (2022)
- [Domain Adaptive Dialog Generation via Meta Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03520/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 72)

- [CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17760/) (2023)
- [Challenges and Applications of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10169/) (2023)
- [FANToM: A Benchmark for Stress-testing Machine Theory of Mind in Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15421/) (2023)
- [Domain Specialization as the Key to Make Large Language Models Disruptive: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18703/) (2023)
- [MathDial: A Dialogue Tutoring Dataset with Rich Pedagogical Properties Grounded in Math Reasoning Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14536/) (2023)
- [Prompting and Evaluating Large Language Models for Proactive Dialogues: Clarification, Target-guided, and Non-collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13626/) (2023)
- [LLMaAA: Making Large Language Models as Active Annotators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19596/) (2023)
- [Prompt-Based Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Goal-Oriented Dialogue Policy Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13660/) (2023)
- [Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? The Misleading Success of Simulating Social Interactions With LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05020/) (2024)
- [Learning to Clarify: Multi-turn Conversations with Action-Based Contrastive Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00222/) (2024)
- [PersonaLens: A Benchmark for Personalization Evaluation in Conversational AI Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09902/) (2025)
- [Designing a Dashboard for Transparency and Control of Conversational AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07882/) (2024)
- [Text-Tuple-Table: Towards Information Integration in Text-to-Table Generation via Global Tuple Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14215/) (2024)
- [Controllable Mixed-Initiative Dialogue Generation through Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04147/) (2023)
- [Proactive Assistant Dialogue Generation from Streaming Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05904/) (2025)
- [Simple Prompt Injection Attacks Can Leak Personal Data Observed by LLM Agents During Task Execution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01055/) (2025)
- [Book2Dial: Generating Teacher-Student Interactions from Textbooks for Cost-Effective Development of Educational Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03307/) (2024)
- [NormDial: A Comparable Bilingual Synthetic Dialog Dataset for Modeling Social Norm Adherence and Violation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14563/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Recent Advances in Conversational Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13003/) (2024)
- [SocialDial: A Benchmark for Socially-Aware Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12026/) (2023)
- [DialogStudio: Towards Richest and Most Diverse Unified Dataset Collection for Conversational AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10172/) (2023)
- [How Far Can We Extract Diverse Perspectives from Large Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09799/) (2023)
- [Recent Trends in Personalized Dialogue Generation: A Review of Datasets, Methodologies, and Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17974/) (2024)
- [Contextualization Distillation from Large Language Model for Knowledge Graph Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01729/) (2024)
- [SynthDST: Synthetic Data is All You Need for Few-Shot Dialog State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02285/) (2024)
- [Pearl: A Review-driven Persona-Knowledge Grounded Conversational Recommendation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04460/) (2024)
- [Real or Robotic? Assessing Whether LLMs Accurately Simulate Qualities of Human Responses in Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08330/) (2024)
- [LLM Roleplay: Simulating Human-Chatbot Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03974/) (2024)
- [Lexical Speaker Error Correction: Leveraging Language Models for Speaker Diarization Error Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09313/) (2023)
- [RENOVI: A Benchmark Towards Remediating Norm Violations in Socio-Cultural Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11178/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Collecting high quality conversational data can be very expensive for most applications and infeasible for others due to privacy, ethical, or similar concerns. A promising direction to tackle this problem is to generate synthetic dialogues by prompting large language models. In this work, we use a small set of expert-written conversations as in-context examples to synthesize a social conversation dataset using prompting. We perform several thorough evaluations of our synthetic conversations compared to human-collected conversations. This includes various dimensions of conversation quality with human evaluation directly on the synthesized conversations, and interactive human evaluation of chatbots fine-tuned on the synthetically generated dataset. We additionally demonstrate that this prompting approach is generalizable to multi-party conversations, providing potential to create new synthetic data for multi-party tasks. Our synthetic multi-party conversations were rated more favorably across all measured dimensions compared to conversation excerpts sampled from a human-collected multi-party dataset.