GEMCo: A Validated, Ethically Releasable Proxy for Inaccessible Counselling Data
Philipp Steigerwald, Eric Rudolph, Mara Stieler, Jennifer Burghardt, Robert Lehmann, Jens Albrecht
Abstract
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.
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Classified with taxonomy v2 on Sat, 5 Sept 2026.