A Typology of Synthetic Datasets for Dialogue Processing in Clinical Contexts

Steven Bedrick, A. Seza Doğruöz, Sergiu Nisioi


Abstract
Synthetic datasets are used across linguistic domains and NLP tasks, particularly in scenarios where authentic data is limited (or even non-existent). One such domain is that of clinical (healthcare) contexts, where there exist significant and long-standing challenges (e.g., privacy, anonymization, and data governance) which have led to the development of an increasing number of synthetic datasets. One increasingly important category of clinical dataset is that of clinical dialogues which are especially sensitive and difficult to collect. Therefore, they are commonly synthesized. While such synthetic datasets have been shown to be sufficient in some situations, little theory exists to inform how they may be best used and generalized to new applications. In this paper, we provide an overview of how synthetic datasets are created, evaluated and used for dialogue related tasks in the medical domain. Additionally, we propose a novel typology for use in classifying types and degrees of data synthesis, to facilitate comparison and evaluation.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.653
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
8246–8263
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-653
DOI:
10.63317/3mrn3tpidamx
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Steven Bedrick, A. Seza Doğruöz, and Sergiu Nisioi. 2026. A Typology of Synthetic Datasets for Dialogue Processing in Clinical Contexts. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 8246–8263, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
A Typology of Synthetic Datasets for Dialogue Processing in Clinical Contexts (Bedrick et al., LREC 2026)
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