# GEMCo: A Validated, Ethically Releasable Proxy for Inaccessible Counselling Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23621 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.23621/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [GoEmotions: A Dataset of Fine-Grained Emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00547/) (2020)
- [MAUVE: Measuring the Gap Between Neural Text and Human Text using Divergence Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01454/) (2021)
- [Real-valued (Medical) Time Series Generation with Recurrent Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02633/) (2017)
- [Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01144/) (2021)
- [PsyQA: A Chinese Dataset for Generating Long Counseling Text for Mental Health Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01702/) (2021)
- [Segment Any Text: A Universal Approach for Robust, Efficient and Adaptable Sentence Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16678/) (2024)
- [Speaker and Time-aware Joint Contextual Learning for Dialogue-act Classification in Counselling Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06647/) (2021)
- [AI Systems in Text-Based Online Counselling: Ethical Considerations Across Three Implementation Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08878/) (2026)
- [OnCoCo 1.0: A Public Dataset for Fine-Grained Message Classification in Online Counseling Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09804/) (2025)
- [Transition-Matrix Regularization for Next Dialogue Act Prediction in Counselling Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18539/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents GEMCo, a releasable, human-written proxy for inaccessible counselling data: 86 complete German e-mail counselling conversations (728 messages), expert-authored cases and counsellor sessions with trained role-players. It is validated against a held-out reference of 124 real counselling conversations. The proxy and the real conversations are measured against each other on counsellor strategies and client emotions. The gap is detectable but small. A generative validation supports the analysis. The corpus is the primary contribution. The validation method generalises to any domain where real data cannot be shared but a human-made proxy can. Privacy and ethics keep real counselling data closed. GEMCo carries none by design and can be released, a first step toward language research in this domain.