Does Collaborative Human-LM Dialogue Generation Help Information Extraction from Human Dialogues?

The capabilities of pretrained language models have opened opportunities to explore new application areas, but applications involving human-human interaction are limited by the fact that most data is protected from public release for privacy reasons. Problem-solving human dialogues in real applications can be much more complex than existing Wizard-of-Oz collections, preventing successful domain transfer. To support information extraction (IE) for a private call center dataset, we introduce a human-in-the-loop dialogue generation framework capable of synthesizing realistic dialogues. In IE experiments with auto insurance call center dialogues, we observe 25% relative improvement in F1 after augmenting a small set of real human conversations with synthetic data. We release code and our synthetic dataset to illustrate the complexity of real-world call center conversations and encourage development of complex dialogue datasets that are more representative of natural data.